


Two-Body Problems

by jehans, profoundalpacakitten



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space, Anarchism (lite), Blanket Winter Soldier Fuckery Tag, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Chester Phillips Is Not Amused, Cliffhangers, Cybernetics, Cyberpunk, Declarations Of Love At The Worst Of Times, Depersonalization, Depression, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, Honeypot, I love food and it shows, Identity Porn, Investigations, M/M, Me nerding over space for more than 100k words, Mild Gore, Military, Minor Bucky/Loki, Multiple Personalities, Mutual Pining, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reverse Get Help, Roommates, Sam Wilson is a Gift, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers has ADHD, Swearing, Technobabble, Technopathy, Temporary Amnesia, Temporary Character Death, There Are Forests In Space and They Are All Pines, Thriller, Thrown Out The Airlock, Transhumanism, Wrongful Imprisonment, neon noir
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:35:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 139,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27195206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehans/pseuds/jehans, https://archiveofourown.org/users/profoundalpacakitten/pseuds/profoundalpacakitten
Summary: Steve and Bucky are a lot of things. Roommates. Best friends. Detective partners. And saddled with a new case.Island 1 Space Colony does not see a lot of homicides, unless it's death by red tape while navigating the labyrinthine colony administration. The homicides that do happen are usually solved pretty quickly, too. But this time nobody's talking and everybody's trying to stick their noses in Steve and Bucky's business.Caught between the military's shady dealings, temperamental higher-ups and a witness that keeps slipping through their fingers, Steve and Bucky don't have a lot of time for their own personal drama. With this case, they might have bit off more than they can chew.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Loki/Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 50
Kudos: 62
Collections: Not Another Stucky Big Bang 2020





	1. Two-Body Problem

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my Stucky Big Bang fanfiction, the "everything's cooler in space" story, where nothing will be spared for those boys.
> 
> First and foremost, you have seen it in the tags and summary, yes, Steve and Bucky are detectives. We all know what happened in the US in 2020. Last year, a wave of protests swept across my country, France, and with it a slew of police violence. It happens and has happened everywhere, for years.
> 
> I had a story to tell, and perhaps, making Steve and Bucky investigators in a sci-fi detective force born out of my imagination was a way of reconciling the horrors of today with a hope for a better future. Sci-fi is a great vehicle for critique, for transformation, for analysis, for creativity. It was my way to ponder the what ifs. What if we could start over? In another place, in another time, what would police do? How could they finally serve _us_?
> 
> One cannot write in this fandom and not see the faults and bias we all have: MCU Steve operates so far out of any oversight, but we cheer him on nonetheless. And further yet, comics hinge on the concept of vigilante work. Why? A system cannot rely on heroes to work, or it'll never work. This fanfiction isn't an essay, but I did ask myself a lot of questions, and I hope it can provoke some reflections in you, dear reader.
> 
> This fic wouldn't have seen the light of day if it hadn't been for [Hark_Bananas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hark_bananas/profile), who betaed this fic and steadfastly supported me, through peaks of boundless enthusiasm and pits of despair. They have added and deleted so many commas they could open a punctuation shop. I know no words in the english or french languages that can describe the gratefulness I have that our paths to have crossed.
> 
> I wouldn't have made it through this bang either without my artist, [Jehans/Apblaidd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehans/profile), with whom I share brainwaves in a way that is pretty uncanny. Kind of like Bananas, I've found in them a kindred soul. They have made all the sounds and music and the intro and drawings for this fanfiction, pinch hitting for me eagerly. Dude, I love you, our shared braincell treehouse is a place I treasure, I'm looking forward to us writing together.
> 
> I am immensely thankful for the NASBB mods, whose brilliant idea of organising this Bang has saved my sanity in this hell year, enticing me back into fanfic writing after a 7-years hiatus, and fanart drawing after an even longer time. I am also thankful to all the formidable people I have met thanks to this event. Y'all, I love you. Nos, your soul is beautiful. Weepun, you put a smile on my face with your tweets, sweetcheeks.
> 
> Finally I will close this author's note with a dedication to [Sunhawk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunhawk16/pseuds/Sunhawk16). She was a devoted and talented Gundam Wing fanfiction author. I read her fanfics when I was 15, an awkward teen, artsy and out-of-step with everybody my age. She faithfully wrote GW fanfictions for 18 years, and her one shots and series (go read the Ion Arc!) were instrumental in making me the author that I am today. She also passed away last year.
> 
> With this fanfiction, I'm paying forward the gift she unknowingly gave the shy teen I was. If this fic can inspire a single person to create freely and passionately, or to feel as fascinated with space, and sci-fi as I was, thanks to her, then we'll have come full circle.

> “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
> 
> ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

* * *

### Part I, Chapter 1: A Two-Body Problem

In classical mechanics, the two-body problem predicts the motion of two massive objects which are abstractly viewed as point particles. The problem assumes that the two objects interact only with one another; the only force affecting each object arises from the other one, and all other objects are ignored.

Under the force of gravity, each member of a pair of such objects will orbit their mutual centre of mass in an elliptical pattern, unless they are moving fast enough to escape one another entirely, in which case their paths will diverge along other planar conic sections.

`― Wikipedia “Two-body problem”`

Common examples [of a gravitational two-body problem] are the orbit of a moon around a planet, and of a planet around a star, and two stars orbiting each other (a binary star).

`― Wikipedia “Gravitational two-body problem”`

Designing the O’Neill cylinders, those two space stations you can see during the night — check it out tonight, sky’s clear! — was a real headache. Imagine, two cylinders each thirty-two kilometres long, rotating upon themselves in order to generate one g of gravity, and around each other to counter the Coriolis effect. Now imagine two cylinders so vast they could harbour their own population and ecosystem! Eight — eight! — kilometres in diameter. That means that one guy up there is, right now, looking up to see wispy clouds and a faint ten-centimetre rod over his head. Maybe he even sees the hazy shapes of buildings in the sky. Carbon-fibre pillars to access this axis of rotation, elevators and mobile platforms. He looks down the street and it curves so that — get this — [the teacher draws part of a circle and a stick figure] the street a hundred metres away from him is at eye level.

Of course, this means — yes Greenberg? Well, yeah, of course there’s light. The cylinders are divided into six sections, with habitable areas alternating with sections made of glass. Glass, buildings, glass, buildings… The three deployable mirrors outside reflect sunlight into the station, it’s great. Yeah? No, Greenberg, they don’t “eat moondust,” what are you, five? Population density management divides each section into segments, with the outermost segments always left wild plus another for agricultural purposes, and different segments means different population densities. And also, agricultural pods, which are like… spheres containing their own biome, are rotating outside of the inhabitable areas to protect them. No they don’t just space-fly over to the pods, Greenberg, what the hell? There are access— stop asking stupid questions, Greenberg.

`― Consuela Salamanca, “Space settlement 102” (transcript)`

Loki was drenched in sweat. And blood. It was making his eyes gritty, and his skin felt tight, so tight. Too tight.

What had they done to him? Good-for-nothing wankers. Murderers. What was happening to him?

Blood on his face, dirt under his nails, and that substance, like powder, like ants, all over his skin. He’d been covered with it after… gotten a face full of it… and he knew the effect on the human body, oh shit, he knew. He’d seen Jones, he’d _seen_ him.

Holy shit.

He gasped and gritted his teeth against the pain. He had to hold himself up against one of the supporting beams, careful not to put his hand in the retroactive wheels spinning wildly in the wall. He wasn’t supposed to be here, how did he even get here? He looked at the beam, at the place where his hand had slid down, leaving a red imprint.

He lost time —

When he regained his senses, he was frantically wiping at the mark, his every breath a struggle.

Loki shook himself out of his daze, his long, dark hair matted to his brow with dried filth. He had to get out. Home, maybe.

He had to get out, wash her blood off his body, see Thor.

No. Not Thor. He was one of them.

He had to disappear.

* * *

Steve woke up with a gasp, sitting up sharply in his bed. He looked around, disoriented, and grabbed for his phone, which was ringing shrilly in the darkness. He poked at the screen to shut the obnoxious ringtone off — Bucky had changed it a while back as a joke, and Steve had gritted his teeth and said, "Love it! Sounds like a songbird!" And now, weeks later, his lie had come back to bite him in the ass.

“Hello?” he croaked out, then immediately yawned.

“Rogers,” came Phillips' voice, a bark in the dead of night. “You and Barnes are called in.” Steve stifled a groan and glanced at the clock on the wall.

4:17 a.m., it read. Steve didn’t stifle his groan this time, which really didn’t fly with Deputy Commissioner Phillips. “Something to add, Rogers? Questions?”

Steve tried to rouse himself a little further and shook his head, as if Phillips could see him. “No, sir. I mean, yes!” He dragged a hand through his hair and then down his face, wincing when his nails caught on the flat, round implants near his eyes. “Sorry, uh, yeah, questions. What are we expecting?”

“Homicide, most likely.”

Steve pulled his phone away from his ear and looked at it incredulously before putting it back. “I’m sorry, what? Again?” The last murder case — easily solved, but still — had been only two weeks ago. With homicide rates around eight per year in a colony of 500,000 inhabitants, two dead bodies in two weeks was a cause for concern. Steve had already mentioned to Phillips that some of the statistics were disquieting, especially those from the spaceport district but… That was still too many dead bodies in too short a time.

“Bring Barnes, and be at HQ at five to be briefed,” Phillips muttered darkly and then hung up, because the Deputy Commissioner of the Violent Crime Unit could be charming at any time of the day or night.

“Ugh.” Steve let himself fall back onto the bed and stared dazedly at the ceiling, trying to gear himself up for a shitty day. The radiation surge from last night’s sunstorm was going to give him a headache, he was sure of it. He took stock of himself, of his ocular nerve implant (when had he last calibrated it? Damn), his heart (still beating, cool), his external bionic spine (creaky) — everything felt as fine as could be. “Okay, time to get up, Steve,” he mumbled.

First things first, he went to the kitchen to make breakfast. He needed something tasty to compensate for being woken up at such an outrageous hour, and French toast would do just fine. Still half-asleep, he quickly whisked together the eggs and milk and put some leftover stale bread into the mixture before padding down the hall to Bucky’s room.

Being roommates with his best friend was close to living the dream, in Steve’s opinion. They were registered with Colony Housing as “Friends or Known Acquaintances,” which, at least, spared them the endless parade of visits from government employees checking that everything was okay, or mediators enquiring whether they had managed to set up laundry schedules. Also, he had his best friend right there, every day. They also complimented each other in a lot of ways; for example, Steve liked baking whereas Bucky liked cooking for the evenings. Bucky was never deterred by Steve’s sometimes surly moods, and Steve was always ready to help when Bucky got depressed.

They’d also known each other since they were kids and had gone through school, detective academy, heartbreak and joys, birthdays and funerals, all of it, together. Steve couldn’t really imagine living with anyone other than Bucky.

Also, being roommates with his detective partner? That made coordinating schedules pretty simple.

“Bucky? Rise and shine!” Steve pounded on the door and yawned for the hundredth time. There were some rustling noises and a muffled word or two, but nothing more.

“Early bird gets the French toast, dude.” Steve stretched his arms above his head and groaned when he felt his spine pop, and there was a whirr of protest from his bionic implant. “God, wow. Ouch.” He looked one last time at Bucky’s bedroom door. “Late birdies can suck it.”

He padded back toward the kitchen and took a pan out. In the pitch black of the colony’s night, he could hear the last dregs of the sunstorm that had hit Island 1. It sounded almost like butter sizzling in a pan, so much so that when he began frying the French toast, both sounds merged into an annoying buzz.

  
  


Steve was already eating and reading the news on his tablet when he heard Bucky’s door open and the sound of his soft footfalls coming down the hall. His hearing was pretty shit on his left side, so he had some difficulty pinpointing exactly where Bucky was. But, when, a moment later, Bucky made his way slowly into their tiny living room, Steve swore internally.

Now that? Those _abs_? That was the real hardship that came from being roommates with your best friend, coworker, buddy, whatever.

Because sure, Steve was no gargoyle, but he wasn’t an underwear model, either. He was lanky and bony and only a metre sixty-five, a secret which he tried to hide from the world as if nobody would notice that he had to look up at his own damn detective partner. At least he didn’t have too many back problems, thanks to some help from cybernetics and implants, but he had always cut a thin figure, all angles and sarcastic edges.

However, anybody would look gargoylesque next to Bucky. Bucky had been cute as a teenager, before he had joined Steve in his crazy plan to become a detective officer and, of fucking course, had thrived at the academy, both emotionally and physically. Now, he was just… dashing. Tall. Not too beefy, hair perpetually well styled, charming. His hugs had gotten increasingly amazing as he gained bulk.

At first, Steve hadn’t noticed. They had lived in each other’s pockets for so long that he hadn’t registered the changes. Then, halfway through the academy, Steve had just _seen_ Bucky. And then, when they’d graduated, they hadn’t initally been hired in the same units , and spending the working day apart had given Steve just enough perspective to realise that Bucky was pretty fucking hot.

Which wouldn’t be a problem if Steve hadn’t caught some fucking feelings along the way. Some definitely not friendly — more than friendly? — feelings. Or maybe he’d had them since the beginning.

So best friend plus roommate? Prime view, every day, the perfect situation on paper. But then again, Steve could do without the frustration and the fear of showing how far his feelings had evolved.

Steve munched furiously on his French toast and pointedly didn’t look at Bucky’s torso as he walked around half-dressed, his face soft with sleep.

“Heya, Stevie.” Bucky yawned hugely. “What’s up, now?”

“Phillips called us in. There’s a new dead body. Homicide, he says.” Which was an assumption Steve knew Phillips didn’t make lightly.

Bucky snorted. “Homicide.” He went foraging in the fridge then abruptly stopped and turned around. “Wait, what?”

Steve pointed his fork at Bucky’s astonished face, not paying attention to Bucky’s anything else, no siree. “Yeah, that’s what I said.” He poked a finger at his tablet’s screen, zooming in on a picture in yet another article about the transhuman political movement and its link to the heavily-modded population of the spaceport district. He knew some people in the cyborg community, — you couldn’t have as many implants as he had without knowing some of them — and every headline like this made him antsy. Anxious. Recent strikes in the docks had given rise to an uncomfortable rhetoric that he wasn’t sure he liked. He scanned the pictures to check if he recognized anyone. Maybe he’d need to tell Phillips.

His perusal of the article was interrupted by a brief sigh and the sound of Bucky banging the fridge door closed.

“That’s the sixth one in as many months, what the fuck.” Bucky sat down heavily in his chair with another sigh that morphed into a yawn. “I mean, okay, we’re in the Violent Crimes Unit, but you’d think people would be nice enough to, I don’t know…”

“Bash themselves softly over the head?” Steve asked with a smile.

Bucky snorted. “Burglars, but in broad daylight.”

“Mmhmm.” Steve pointed at Bucky’s plate of French toast. “Eat up, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Bucky shook his head as he mangled his French toast, trying to cut it with his fork. “Fucking homicides. Hope we solve it as fast as the last one.”

* * *

The agricultural pods were a peculiar place, green and alive and overlooking the immensity of the cosmos. They offered the best view in the entire solar system, if you asked Steve, since they orbited at the Earth-Moon Lagrange 4 point, which put them in the perfect position to see the Moon, Earth, and the zodiacal light and gegenschein shining through the L4 Kordylewski cloud. If you walked up to the inner shell of the pod, you could see the vastness of space and its blanket of unblinking stars, and the Moon, like a small ball of dust, chasing the blue orb of the Earth. Island 1 and Island 2 were rotating slowly clockwise and anticlockwise above Steve’s head, their mirror shields opening like the metallic petals of a gargantuan flower, like two silvery sunflowers seeking the sun, harbouring nearly two million people.

The day cycle had begun only minutes ago, and the three mirrors of each Island, closed around the colony during the whole night to shield it, were now being unfolded. The sunstorm had died down enough that the crackling of particles entering the Islands’ artificial magnetic shield was now nearly inaudible. He’d seen pictures of auroras on Earth; too bad they didn’t have an ozone layer surrounding the station, this morning could have been so much more beautiful. Steve watched the Sun rise over Earth in the faraway distance, its light blooming over the reinforced surface of the outer glass of the agripod.

Space was incredible and never ending. Right there, with those windows overlooking the station, it felt like being on the edge of something infinite and deadly, deadly like the sun spitting radiation so strong that the colony’s shielding couldn’t even prevent its most sensitive residents from having killer headaches.

The coroner, Bruce Banner, a meek but very efficient guy, was wrapping up the last of his measurements and taking the last of his samples in the basement level of the pod, located underneath the fields and gardens. Bucky was still down there with him, checking that everything was okay and trying to guess at what flavour of homicide they were looking at, but Steve had needed to get back upstairs after the first few minutes. A sudden wave of dizziness had overtaken him, owing to the gruesomeness of the scene, the suffocatingly humid atmosphere in the fungal cave, and the sunstorm-induced migraine that was driving a spike through his brain. Some people reacted more strongly to leftover radiation, and he was, sadly, part of that group.

For the hundredth time that day, Steve scratched at his spinal brace, which let out an angry beep. “Shit.” He tried to stop the beeping, frantically pushing at his C7 external vertebra, and swore again when he saw the reflection of Bucky coming towards him in the window. This was going to turn into a motherhenning circus act so fast.

“Steve? You okay out there?”

“Yeah, yeah, just my stupid fake spine.” He pushed on it again, trying to restore the skin contact, but to no avail. “Ugh, that fucking prosthe- gah!”

“Wait.” Steve felt Bucky’s fingers on his neck, two cool points of contact against his overheated and scratched-up skin. There was a soft click, and then blessed silence.

Bucky’s fingers didn’t leave his neck, gently lying on his abused skin and the external spinal prosthetic. Steve closed his eyes, savouring the feeling, but anxiously counting down the seconds until this would cross from friendly to weird. He must be so obvious. How many more times could this happen until Bucky noticed? Noticed how Steve craved those touches?

“C’mon, Stevie, Banner’s team has finished, he’s ready to give us a rundown of the scene. He said he might have some interesting stuff for us before we have to go back to the Bullpen.”

“Yeah.” Steve opened his eyes, just in time to see a thoughtful look on Bucky’s face, hazy in the clear glass reflection.

Then Bucky smiled cockily. “Let’s see what Banner has in store for us.”

Walking back across the wheat field, Steve sniffed the air, taking in the scent of straw, fresh grass and humus coming from the copse of trees bordering the several cereal fields that were separated by hedges. He was so used to walking on the colony’s upcurved ground that the flatness of the agripod fields felt quite jarring.

He took one last breath of fresh air before descending into the cave. Bucky didn’t seem that bothered, but his jaw visibly jumped when they arrived at the stairs descending to the scene of the crime.

Halfway down the stairs, they had to put on their masks, covering half their faces in a ridged Kevlar cover that only let a slightly distorted version of their voices filter through. The smell of rot was so overpowering that the shitty standard-issue filters couldn’t prevent some of it from passing through. The bleak blue light falling down from the ceiling made the gruesome scene eerie, bloodstains pooling in black puddles on the ground, the white mushrooms that were cultivated here dotted with specks of blood that some techs were still sampling.

On the cement floor was a woman, lying close to the strange construction of humus and mycelium, half-propped on a tool shelf, her arms askew. The body looked bloated and burnt where skin was visible. Parts of the fabric of her clothes looked nearly shredded; blood had spilled everywhere from some sort of wound on her abdomen, seeping into the piles of humus torn from the walls.

“No more mushroom omelettes for me,” grumbled Steve.

Bucky snorted, his greyish-blue eyes crinkling at the corners. They looked ethereally bright in the strange, ultraviolet-rich lighting.

Orbiting far away from the corpse, Bruce Banner was making the last rounds inspecting the scene, security overshoes and surgical mask on. He was changing a pair of soiled nitrile gloves for another, his minions scurrying around inside the limited space like an army of drones, tidying up and packing their stuff to get back to the lab.

Steve and Bucky stopped right behind the cordoned-off area, next to the holographic lights that read “Restricted Area/Crime Scene”.

“Hey, Banner, we’re back.” Bucky scratched his throat at its juncture with the mask and coughed lightly. “Is your team ready to go back to their dungeon yet?”

“Ah, Barnes. Rogers. Yes, yes. They are.” Banner checked that the buttons of his jumpsuit were still closed. “Should I start with the good news? Bad news? The strange stuff?”

Steve had been looking around, taking in all the macabre details of the scene, but the mention of “strange stuff” made him focus his attention back on Banner. “Strange stuff.”

“Good news,” Bucky said at the exact same time.

Banner raised an eyebrow. Steve shook his head and smiled under his mask. “Okay, good news,” he conceded.

“Alright. Good news is that she’s from this colony. We scanned her body on scene, and bone density matches that of the typical Island inhabitant.”

Steve nodded, so even without ID, they would find her in the system soon enough, that was good. Next to him, Bucky was tapping away on his tablet, making notes as Banner went on.

“Bad news is that this is clearly not your run-of-the-mill death. She wasn’t alone, several people were here. It could be accidental, but could also be”— he walked around until he reached one of the discs projecting the blinking yellow light that signaled a piece of evidence —“murder.”

Down on the ground next to his left foot was what looked like a cartridge. Steve was too far away to see what type it was, and Bucky was, too, judging by his frown and the subsequent rapid-fire tip-tapping of his fingers on his tablet.

Murder.

Who the fuck murdered anyone in this colony?

“Okay, strange stuff?” Steve prompted.

Banner hummed. “I can already tell you there’s nanotech of a kind involved. Look at that.”

Steve raised a suspicious eyebrow. Nanotech? That stuff was mostly laboratory science, to his knowledge.

Bruce pointed at several other discs scattered around an open case in pretty bad shape. Smears and strangely square-shaped patterns of some sort of grey matter littered the cement floor, a contrasting dark grey, powdery and slightly shiny under the dreary light. Some of the material was sprinkled on some parts of the humus walls, and maybe the body, if Steve understood the evidence-disk pattern right.

“This is nanotech, couldn't mistake that for anything else,” Banner declared unequivocally.

Bucky hummed while he wrote this down. “How do you figure?”

Banner shrugged. “I worked in techie labs before going into the force. Caught my eye.” After pushing up his goggles, he approached the corpse. “Nanomaterials tend to have very, _very_ weird physical properties, and this stuff made most of our analysis devices go haywire. Radiation, electricity. This powder has been somehow aggregated into some sort of fabric. It still dissolves upon mechanical contact, but now it seems mostly inert,” he continued absently.

Bucky and Steve exchanged a pointed glance.

“Is it illegal?” Steve asked.

“Easy way to find out. Is it on the market? If not, it's illegal. Nanomaterials are often either toxic, hardly usable or dangerous. And generally, they can be pretty harmful when mishandled, and are mostly interesting for their physical properties.” Banner made a vague gesture towards the body. “Like new materials for the colony. This domain of research is pretty tightly controlled by the military, and thus, Earth.” He signalled for his technicians to pack up some big monstrosity of a machine. “That's why I got out. Too much meddling, too much politics. Your lab can get closed down for no reason and no appeal to the colony is of any use.”

Steve’s mind churned. The Space Armed Forces were, ironically, the last bastion of Earth’s control over Space, and if this case really got tied to the military, they could quickly get swamped under red tape and bureaucracy. Bucky’s tablet beeped.

“Steve, the witnesses have been processed, we should get back for interrogation.”

Bruce nodded absently before going back to yell at his minions still milling about in the cave-like space.

Steve sighed. “Yeah, better get back.”

* * *

On their way back to the Bullpen, the appropriately-nicknamed colony police building, Bucky and Steve received a call from HQ. The colony was only beginning to wake up for the regular nine-to-five employees and the streets and the tram were still filled with the night shift workers coming back home.

Steve’s phone rang just as they were leaving the spaceport district, and he stopped to dig it out of his pocket in the middle of a narrow street in segment 1, disrupting the flow of pedestrians coming from and going to the nearby tram station.

Bucky shook his arm as Steve tried to take the call. “Come on, Steve, let it go to voicemail and let’s catch the tram.”

Steve let himself be dragged along, pocketing his phone and letting it sing its obnoxious ringtone, but he took it back out again as they caught their breaths in the tram car. “Looks like we won’t have to search too long for her ID,” Bucky muttered as he picked his earbud out of his jacket pocket so that he could listen in on the call, too.

They listened to the dispassionate voice of a cadet giving them the rundown of some new info on the victim that had cropped up. “Martina Ahmed, metamaterials scientist in lab Alpha. The spouse, Amira Ahmed, is a closed ecological systems engineer. She lives on Aganagić Lane, number eleven, flat number five.” There was a silence only interrupted by the muttering of other cadets voices in Dispatch, then their caller explained, “That’s around the corner from the theatre, in segment four.”

Bucky whistled, impressed. “Ooooh seg four, niiice.” Segment four was the second-to-last inhabitable sector of the colony — the rest was left wild. Housing in segment four was very similar to that of their own sector, low-rise apartment buildings with communal gardens, but the neighbourhood was much calmer and had more trees shielding them from the bank of windows into space. “How come they ID’d her so fast? We didn’t even get her prints or biometrics back from the lab and she didn’t have her papers on her.”

“Madam Ahmed filed a CWU three hours ago when her wife didn’t come home.” The dispatcher’s voice was still droning on. “She reported that Martina Ahmed is very punctual, hasn’t answered her phone for hours, and didn’t come home at night, so she sent the form first thing this morning. We cross-checked the photograph with recent pictures logged in the system, it pinged with your case.” The cadet’s voice was cut short by the disconnect tone beeping dully in their ears.

CWU — or Citizen’s Whereabouts Unknown — was a simple form anyone could file with the Island Detective Station to signal that someone was missing. CWUs were often solved pretty quickly, thanks to the colony’s security cameras. It was hard to get lost in a floating tin can in the middle of space, but it just so happened that sometimes people did get lost… or more rarely, bumped off in a dark corner.

“Ugh, I’m hungry,” Bucky complained as Steve slipped his phone back in his pocket.

“Yeah, well, our breakfast was nearly four hours ago.” Bucky looked at him imploringly, which only elicited the snarkiest eyebrow raise in return. “No, I don’t have any spare French toast in my pockets.”

Bucky whined desperately, “I feel terrible.” He brought his hand to his forehead. “I might faint.”

Steve snorted and shook his head. “Quit it, you dork.”

“Can’t we stop for a croissant?”

Steve looked at the time on his phone. “Since their flat is on the same tram line, how about we stop by the Ahmeds’ flat first, and then we'll find something to eat on the way to the Bullpen.”

“Okay.” Bucky shrugged. Steve hummed distractedly as his gaze caught on a flash of light on the windows, a crew of people no bigger than small dots scurrying across the glass, surely making some repairs. The tram stopped at a station, and Steve kept watching, wondering if they were doing standard repairs or if this was a check-up after last night’s heavy dose of radiation. The people-dots, in their shiny orange suits, glided over the huge rectangle of space. Then the tram moved again, and the workers disappeared from view.

When Steve checked back on Bucky, he saw that he was now engrossed in his own notes, a sure sign that Steve had gotten distracted and Bucky had seen no obligation to call him out on it. So Steve turned back to his window and spent the rest of the ride watching space above the horizon of buildings.

Luckily, they had taken the tram line that left them closest to their destination. Martina and Amira’s flat was just a short walk away from the tram stop, in a little white three-storey building surrounded by similar houses and communal gardens, opening in the back towards green hills and the same bank of windows overlooking space that Steve had been raptly watching on the tram. This segment was close to the last row of buildings before the regulated empty “countryside” land that was needed to maintain interior oxygen levels, air purity, and morale. It had been proven that greenery was paramount to regulating morale, and in an enclosed space, even one as gigantic as an O'Neill cylinder, no one wanted people going bonkers from cabin fever and the overwhelming absence of any colour but grey.

They stopped outside on the pavement and looked at the small building, so very similar to the one they lived in, and Steve dug his phone out again just to be sure they hadn’t received anything else from the Bullpen during the tram ride. He read his messages out loud while trailing behind Bucky as he walked up to the building.

“Okay, so Amira sends her CWU, it gets transferred to CamSec, they check, and they’re pinged with several appearances of Martina all over the colony — oh, that’s new — then she disappears from view at ten p.m. last night. Ten p.m., huh, that’s a bit late for—” Bucky hummed under his breath as he stopped in front of the building’s door. Steve wasn’t watching, so he bumped lightly into Bucky and groaned, “Ugh, Bucky!”

Bucky snorted.

Steve clucked his tongue and resumed reading. “Ass… anyway, ten on a Tuesday, isn’t this a bit late even for a workaholic scientist?”

“Says the workaholic detective pulling off his own ten p.m. shifts at the Bullpen? Oh I don’t know Steve…” Bucky threw him a meaningful glance.

“That’s… neither here nor there,” Steve huffed. He had stuff to do, okay? Cases didn’t solve themselves!

Bucky grinned. “Should I do the talking?”

Steve looked heavenward, feeling a bit peeved at the pot-shots that Bucky took at his work habits and lack of interrogation skills. “Yes, Bucky, I’ll leave this one to you, Bucky. Of course, Bucky, you are so smooth, please talk to the grieving woman in my stead and rescue me from my cluelessness.”

Bucky’s eyes widened in the face of all that sass directed his way. “Damn, Steve, you sure are salty today.”

“Sorry…” Steve sighed. “It’s the sunstorm. Gave me a headache.”

“I was just teasing, you know that, right?” Bucky looked at Steve worriedly, with his big grey eyes and preoccupied frown. With his blue shirt peeking out from under the beige-and-cream detective uniform, he looked just dishevelled enough, and the shirt kinda brought out his eyes…

Steve shook himself and tried to remember what Bucky had just said, to no avail, so he answered with a vague, interrogative, “Yeah?”

Bucky snorted, “Right,” and strode into the building’s small lobby. He climbed the stairs and Steve followed on his heels, trying to shake himself up and stop getting distracted by every fucking thing in his line of sight, especially his partner. They stopped in front of a door with a cheery doormat proclaiming that there was no place like home. They exchanged a strained smile, and Bucky knocked on the door.

Dark-haired, dark-eyed and weary, that’s what Steve thought when he looked at Amira Ahmed. He exchanged a glance with Bucky and nodded.

“Hello, Amira Ahmed?” She nodded and her lips visibly quivered when she checked their insignias. “Detective Officers Barnes and Rogers. May we speak with you inside?”

She covered her face with her hand for one second, visibly taking the time to compose herself. Then she put on a valiant smile and opened her door wider. “Please come in, officers.”

The apartment was messy but cosy, with pieces of machinery strewn on the shelves, potted plants everywhere, and a kitchen stacked with dirty dishes. Pictures of a happy couple adorned the flat, with some going as far back as a childhood spent on Earth. Steve noticed that they seemed to have moved to Space in their teens, according to some of the pictures. Might be why Martina had the bone density of a Spacer.

They looked like they’d been joined at the hip for years.

An awkward silence ensued as Steve catalogued all those tidbits of information, while Amira looked like she wanted to be anywhere but there. Bucky just smiled reassuringly and nodded towards the kitchen chairs. “May we sit?”

“Uh, yes. Please. Here!” She pointed to the table, flustered, then stopped pointing, hiding her hands behind her back. Steve smiled at her sympathetically and sat at the table, getting his stuff out while Bucky did his charm thing and invited Amira to sit, too.

“This morning, you filed a CWU at our missing persons unit for your wife, Martina Ahmed,” Bucky said with the gentlest voice he could. She nodded and murmured that she hadn’t been able to sleep because of the storm. “Your file was processed and cross-referenced with all public camera records and open cases.”

There was a little bit of silence. Detectives rarely made house calls for mundane everyday affairs. Amira gulped. “I don’t think I want to hear this.” She shook her head. “I don’t.” She got up and turned towards the messy kitchen.

“Madam Ahmed.” Bucky also got up and, under the watchful eye of Steve, managed to put himself in front of Amira without cornering her. “Madam Ahmed, you might not want to hear this, but I think you should.”

She put her hands over her ears, as if she could prevent sound from reaching her.

“Madam, we found a body this morning—”

“No.” She looked out the window.

“—and the facial records were matched against the CWU you opened. We could benefit from a physical recognition from a parent, spouse or someone with a close relationship—”

“I don’t. I don’t want to hear this!” She glared at Bucky with teary eyes.

He barrelled on; they were legally bound to inform her. “—but further biometrical records should ensure a better correlation and in match cases of ninety percent or more, we usually leave the option of not going to the morgue, as it becomes redundant.”

She just shook her head while looking him in the eye. “I don’t want to hear this.”

Bucky took a step back, giving her even more breathing room just when Steve thought that he would have tried to comfort her, instead. But Bucky had the best instincts about this kind of thing, and maybe Steve would have boxed her in? Whenever they had to deal with emotional people, Steve always had the best intentions but a very bad execution, while Bucky was the fine-tuned sounding board for witnesses, victims and significant others. His sense of finding the right gestures and words was quite uncanny.

“Would you like to sit?”

“I don’t…” She just looked at him. “Yes?”

“Come on.” He showed the chair. Bucky shot a glance towards Steve, and he caught onto their well-practiced silent communication. Make her agree to simple things in order to get her to talk, if at all possible. And call Grief Support.

Steve smiled gently. “Would you like some tea?”

“Maybe… but…” She looked around, lost.

“Don’t worry about the kitchen, mine is just as messy. I’ll find my way.”

The woman looked so lost. Steve searched the cupboards for cups and tea. In spite of the general untidiness, the kitchen was clean, and there was some strange inner organization determining where everything was. He didn’t even have to spend too much time searching before he found what was needed to fix everyone some tea.

“We are here to try and shine some light on the events of last night,” he heard Bucky say in a soft voice. “We could wait for the Grief Support staff to come and see you before asking but…” Steve sighed and called the Support line, using the noise of the kettle boiling to cover his call because it drowned out the conversation — that is to say, the long silences interspersed with soft words and denials — with bubbling sounds. “But anything you say could help us find out what happened to Martina.”

Steve prepared the tea quickly while Bucky spoke slowly, repeating himself when Amira seemed lost in thought for a minute or two, so that he was ready to drop the cup in front of her just as she had to answer. Giving them something to focus on outside of the conversation helped the people they interrogated distance themselves from touchy subjects. At least, that’s what Bucky had explained to Steve.

Amira stared at her tea blankly for a long while. Steve exchanged a glance with Bucky, and at his questioning head tilt, Steve shook his head. Nothing out of the ordinary in the kitchen.

“Drink up.” Still smiling, Steve nudged the cup in front of her, since she was looking at the tea as if it contained a deep philosophical question to ponder. Contrary to what they had said earlier, Steve was able to be nice. He just wasn’t smooth enough to interrogate.

She stared some more and ended up drinking, anyway, wincing at the temperature.

“How long have you been married?” Bucky asked.

She just shook her head.

“Okay…” Bucky glanced at Steve, who mouthed “teen” and drew a small circle in the air, taking advantage of her distraction. Bucky nodded. “Did you move to Space during your childhood or teens? That could help us confirm her identity.”

Amira’s throat worked, and she bit her lips before answering. “Yeah. We. We both wanted to become scientists. My parents got a research permit and she convinced her parents to let her come study here. We wrote her on our permit, and we all moved here. We’ve been family forever…” Her voice wavered.

“My partner called Grief Support for you. We’ll stay here until they arrive then get out of your hair, okay?” He waited for a sign of acknowledgement that didn’t come. “Here’s my card, and Rogers'.” He took out one of the business cards with his number on it and one with Steve’s from his vest pocket, as Steve made a circle with his fingers around his eye and then a V as she looked at the cards. “You can call us, or come to the police headquarters in segment two whenever you’re ready.” Bucky nodded. Blessed be their shorthand signs, seriously. “Did you know what your wife was researching?”

She plopped the cards back on the table and took a sip of her tea. “Cutting edge metamaterials, that’s what she told me. I… don’t really get all of it, it’s a field very far from mine.”

Bucky acquiesced and sipped his own tea, as if to encourage her to do the same.

“Whatever you can remember about her work will help, anyway,” Steve said, thinking he could pitch in, instead of being just a step above one of the decorative plants. “You can call us if you remember. However, because of the nature of our investigation, we might have to come back and ask questions sooner than you are ready.”

Bucky winced.

She looked at him, uncomprehendingly. “What nature?”

Shit.

“This wasn’t an—” Bucky mouthed “accident” and made huge eyes at him, as if that would help in any way. “—accidental death. There was foul play involved.”

“… foul play?” She shook her head. “No. You can’t say that.” She looked at Bucky beseechingly. “He can’t say that. No one gets murdered around here.”

He should have shut his damn mouth and let Bucky break that news himself. She looked so genuinely lost. She also jumped to conclusions when associating foul play and murder, but that was par for the course with civilians.

Bucky took over, earnest and calming. “Whatever happened, it’s our job to find out, Madam Ahmed. So whatever details you can recall will go a long way.” Bucky moved forward a little. “Did anything out of the ordinary happen recently? Say, in the last weeks? Months? Year?”

She gulped, and the tears finally fell. Steve’s heart was truly breaking in the face of her misery, but he needed to keep his head straight and read her reactions, note anything interesting while Bucky was occupied with trying to get her to come out of her anguish and talk.

Several minutes passed in silence, only interrupted by the quiet shushing and reassurances of Bucky as she cried. Steve gave her a handkerchief at some point so that she could blow her nose. She then excused herself to go to the bathroom, leaving Steve and Bucky alone for several minutes. Steve peered at Bucky, who looked lost in thought.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it through.”

Bucky sighed. “It’s alright.”

Steve fidgeted in place, scratching at a chip on the rim of his cup. “You okay?”

Bucky shook himself and smiled at Steve. “Yeah… Yeah I’m okay.” He jerked his chin towards the hallway Amira had retreated into. “You think she’s genuine?”

Steve reached over and patted Bucky on the back without thinking. “Her reaction felt candid enough. She jumped to murder easily, but then again, lots of people do.”

Bucky hummed thoughtfully, and Steve pulled back his hand when he realised he had been tracing soothing circles on Bucky’s upper back. Way to be a fucking neon sign for yearning, Steve.

Amira came back some minutes later, her eyes red and puffy, but with a much more resolute air about her.

“She was just a normal person, who would do that?”

“Did she seem preoccupied? Angry or fearful recently?”

“No… She had asked for a new grant. She’d had her lab shut down last month because there’d been an accident or something, so she was pretty down about that, even though they relocated, no problem. But that’s all.” Amira let out a sob and dried her tears with her hand. “She was dedicated and passionate. We… I’ve known her my entire life! We were supposed to have a family! This is supposed to be a safe colony!” she said indignantly.

Bucky tried to soothe her, but she was quickly becoming angry. Luck struck, though, when Steve’s watch beeped to alert him that GS had arrived on site. He passed behind Bucky, who was currently in the middle of his “we are doing everything we can” schtick, and tapped his shoulder blade once so that he’d know Steve was going to the door.

Steve opened the door to none other than Clint Barton and his dog. Steve smiled hugely.

“Hey Clint.”

“Hey-o Stevo, you good, man?” Thank god for Barton, the guy was sunshine personified, and his dog Lucky might be the best ball of fluff this side of the Moon.

Steve pointed his thumb behind him. “Someone needs your sympathy and good cheer.”

Thanks to Clint, things proceeded quickly enough afterwards. Amira Ahmed was too shaken, anyway, to be able to give them any information about her wife. It was already a small miracle that they’d gotten anything at all. They bade her goodbye as Clint was guiding her to the sofa and asking if dog hair on the couch bothered her.

Bucky let out a trembling breath when they got out of the building. Steve hesitated — was hugging dangerous territory? Maybe. He’d stay in a Bucky hug for hours if he could. But Bucky needed the comfort. Steve shook himself and embraced Bucky tightly.

“You okay?”

“I don’t know how Barton does it.” Bucky hugged him back. “Grieving people are hard.”

“You did great.”

“Thanks.”

“Want some pastry?”

“You buttering me up?” Bucky sniffed and let go.

Steve shrugged. “Come on, what’s the point of passing the academy with flying colours if we can’t live the perfect officer trope? Let’s have a donut.”

Bucky snorted. “Okay Stevie, but you’re paying.”

* * *

They got off at Susskind station, a whole two stations before their tram stop, just so they could make a pit stop at a little boulangerie and get a donut each — plus croissant for Bucky who was “so hungry Steve, oh my god!”— and some coffee. And since the station's weatherman had settled on making this April 17th a nicely balmy day, they decided to amble sedately towards the police HQ through streets that were emptier now that day the workers were safely ensconced in their offices.

The light coming from the second shield mirror shone bright and sunny into the cylinder, and Steve watched distractedly as Bucky tilted his head into the sunlight like a haute-couture model, light beige police vest open over his dark blue fitted shirt. His slightly wavy hair caught the rays, and Steve could easily see why Bucky would spend so much time on it every morning. _God, he’s so beautiful_ , Steve thought absently as he munched on his donut. What if Bucky looked at him right now, would he see his crush, plain as day on Steve’s face? Steve swallowed his mouthful and immediately shifted his attention somewhere else.

"When did they say your cochlear circuit implant would be ready?" Bucky asked beside him, interrupting his musings.

“Day after tomorrow.” Steve dunked the last piece of donut in his milky coffee. “They said the operation is quite run-of-the-mill, won’t take too long. I’ll be back at work the same day.” He fished out his soggy donut and ate it, dripping coffee on his hand.

Bucky made a face. “That’s disgusting, Steve.”

Steve smiled and licked his hand to catch the drops of coffee, just to see his friend cringe.

Bucky mock-frowned, then burst out laughing at Steve’s obnoxious behaviour. Steve thought he was out of the woods, but alas, Bucky hadn’t forgotten his earlier question. “Have you planned on taking time off? How many days is the doctor gonna require you to take?”

“A day at the least,” Steve grumbled. Fuck, he hated talking about his health. “But those implants are outpatient surgery, and it’s the weekend right after, so I don’t know…”

Bucky frowned for real this time as they stopped at a red light to let the flow of bicycles pass. “That paid sick leave and the doctor’s advice aren’t just there for show, Steve.” Bucky always worried about stuff like this. 

Steve just shrugged and dodged a straggling cyclist, and then with a sigh, he tried to placate Bucky. “Look, I’ll see. If I feel under the weather, all wonky or something, I _promise_ that I’ll go straight home.”

Bucky scoffed. “Well if you _promise_ , what can I do?” He combed his hand through his hair, leaving it looking just as well-coiffed as before, the handsome asshole. Ugh. What the fuck was his secret?

“What do you mean?” Steve frowned.

Bucky glanced at him from the corner of his eye, smirking.

“What do you mean? Come on!” Okay, now he was getting worked up over this; he’d tried to stay cool in the face of Bucky’s ribbing, but look how all his efforts went down the drain. Fucking Bucky Barnes.

“What I _mean_ , Steven Grant Rogers, is that the problem isn’t the promise but your very own personal definition of discomfort.”

Mood definitively soured now, Steve just shut up. And maybe he walked a little faster just because he was a petty, petty man. No one would know.

Well, Bucky would, but maybe Steve could try to ignore him, right? That shouldn’t be a problem, after all he _only_ worked and lived with the guy, ha. Piece of fucking cake.

Okay, so maybe Steve felt angry enough to kick a pebble on the lunarcrete ground, which bounced off of a nearby support pillar. Bucky sniggered, which made Steve angrier. This was _so_ not the day for gentle ribbing.

“You’re looking like a wet cat, Steve, stop frowning.”

“Am not.”

“Oh god, you are five years old.”

As they made their way silently towards the ten-storey Bullpen building, Steve wondered what could have pushed someone to murder that woman, so far out in a pod. And why would someone go out there in the first place? He opened his mouth to remark on it, but Bucky beat him to it. “An agripod is a strange place to get murdered in, right?” Steve hummed, used to Bucky being on the same wavelength as he was. Bucky continued, “I mean, there is the advantage of seclusion, but that’s on the murderer. Why would the victim go so far out?”

“Meetup point? Secret rendezvous?” Steve snorted. “An illicit tryst?”

“Hah! Oh, come on, Steve, is a mushroom factory your idea of a date?”

“I’m serious! There's a wheat field upstairs!” Steve frowned. “And the view is quite stunning, you know…”

Bucky shuddered. “Yeah, if you're into gazing into the abyss as the abyss gazes into you.”

“If I didn’t grow up with you on this station, I’d think you were an Earther, pal, seriously.”

Bucky chuckled as they finally reached Stanford Square, its greenery overshadowed by the buildings around it, which quite literally loomed over the square because of the curvature of the colony’s structure.

In front of them, the Space Detective headquarters rose like a grey-and-blue block of stone and glass with an old pediment emblazoned “Lost & Found” in bronze letters, dating back to the foundation of the colony when detectives existed mostly to find your lost multimetre.

The façade showed all the hallmarks of the stereotypical Spacer architecture, an austere brick building made of lunarcrete — a concrete that could be assembled from lunar regolith, or any kind of regolith, which space colonies had in spades — in varying shades of grey. Some windowpanes were replaced with brickwork layered with a sticky cyanobacterial component that allowed for the production of oxygen and nitrogen fixing, and a welcome change in the colour scheme of the tower with its bright turquoise shade.

Every floor of the building was dedicated to a task or a police department in particular. The first and second floors were temporary offices for the teams that had to be deployed everywhere in the Lunar sector: Island 1 and 2, the three Moon stations, and both permanent relays with the Mars initiative and Earth on Ceres and in GEO orbit. Third floor was dedicated to special gear, which was mostly hundreds of beige spacesuits, respirators, and a very finite amount of replacement tablets for the clumsily-inclined officers. Permanent offices occupied the fourth to ninth floors, with their open-plan offices for each unit, the cadet-specific floor, unimaginatively dubbed “the kindergarten,” the long hallways with the commissioners’ offices, and two shared mess-like canteens. On floor ten were the archives, where every report got filed, as well as every court judgement. It shared space with the so-called library and its huge open space dedicated to layouts and floor plans of any and every building you could find in this sector. It contained some much-treasured paper blueprints of the earliest plans ever done for each space colony. Rows upon rows of books, some even imported from Earth, and specialized search engines could help any officer in finding data about the colony or its inhabitants.

A lot of data was blocked because of the Privacy Blanket, and CamSec didn’t release their footage to just anyone. However, the Bullpen could issue special derogations during investigations so detectives could dig into a citizen’s past or present activity — this only required a metric ton of bullshit paperwork and requests for waivers of privacy.

Steve looked furtively at Bucky as they rode the elevator and already felt his peevish mood dissolving into thin air. Bucky looked calm, content, and Steve had always soaked up his good moods like a sponge. He was humming under his breath, and Steve’s gaze caught on his shoulders, stretching the fabric of his soft jacket just so…

How come Bucky had grown in all the right places in the academy whereas Steve had just shot up five centimetres and gotten prosthesised to hell and back to correct his various Spacer illnesses? What good was a bionic heart if it beat all wonky whenever he looked at his best friend too long?

And he had this smile, his easy Detective Officer Barnes smile. His “I’m going to ask you nice questions and write cool reports about it” smile. Bucky loved paperwork, loved reviewing hours of footage and… ah, damn it.

“Fuck, I know.”

“Steve?” Bucky looked at him, puzzled.

Steve facepalmed in dismay. “I know why they all were in an agripod.” The elevator’s doors whooshed open. “There are seldom cameras in the agripods because the data feed needs to be entirely dedicated to crop and herd monitoring.”

Bucky grimaced. “Means no footage of the homicide then?”

Steve made grabby hands at the tablet they shared. “We’ll be lucky if we get footage of them at all.” Bucky opened the doors for him as he checked what CamSec had forwarded earlier while they were interviewing Amira.

“Bingo. No footage of the events proper.” Bucky grunted, disappointed at the confirmation. Steve went on, “So here they listed a dock worker who was seen on the transfer platform to the Axis with Martina, and two farmers who were seen working in the adjoining agripods by the one camera in operation there. Lucky us, it was late enough at night that there weren’t a lot of people around…” Steve hummed and scrolled. “There are also two SAF soldiers who had been seen patrolling around the area, which, excuse me, but what the hell? Patrols in agripods? Are those even supposed to be patrolled? I thought they restricted themselves to outbound spaceflights, hull, and entry points.”

Bucky made a surprised sound as he opened the door to one of the numerous open-plan offices which had given the building its nickname. He quickly found their semi-permanent cluttered workstation and grabbed a stylus and tablet of his own.

“Anyway, some guy also went into agripod 23 and was captured by CamSec, but the algorithm didn’t see him get out. We also have a _no_ already on identity movements of the SAF soldiers.”

Bucky tried to sketch the scene and the comings and goings to get a feel for what had gone down. Steve looked over and tsked, and they exchanged tablets so that Steve could put his drawing skills to good use.

They volleyed the information gathered by the other administrative body back and forth for several minutes, trying to get a clearer picture of yesterday night’s events.

“Alright, so we have the Army, patrolling in the access tunnels to the agripods — who knows what for? — but we can’t access their route going into or out of the agricultural ring, and one dude disappears into the pod, never to return. Martina gets killed. So there could have been up to four people at the scene. Oh… what the hell?” Bucky’s brow shot up towards his hairline as he read the message that had just popped up on his screen.

Steve stopped sketching arrows in and out of his scene. “What the hell, what?”

“Some police cadet doing the rounds found blood in one of the ducts during the early bird shift. Labs have flagged it for our case because of timeframe, blood type, and I shit you not, ‘unknown powdery substance.’”

Steve peered at the screen over Bucky’s shoulder. “The ducts?” Bucky scrolled down the flag report and Steve tried to follow. “Those aren’t even accessible to the public. How did Martina’s blood end up there?”

“Maybe she hurt herself on all the reaction wheels inside?”

Steve shook his head. “Nah, would have triggered some major alarms in the mainframe. This sounds fishy as hell.” Steve stood back up. “Okay, let’s get those interrogations out of the way, and maybe once we’re finished, we’ll also have lab work results back for both of the scenes.” 

Steve marched purposefully towards the interrogation rooms, Bucky on his heels. He could hear the grin in Bucky’s voice as he asked, “So… do you wanna be the good cop?”

Steve gave him an epic eye roll. “Bucky, come on. Why do you have to rub it in?”

Bucky guffawed. “Because I’ll forever treasure the day you made a grown-ass three-hundred pound modded dock worker cry.” He sniggered. “It’s like… engraved in my own internal hall of fame.”

Steve tried but failed not to laugh. “You’re such a shit.”

“Heart o’ gold, zero social skills. You are truly unique, Rogers.”

“Okay, I don’t have to suffer through this.” He stopped at the beige door marked #56. “You can be an asshole outside or come do your job inside.” Steve opened the door and gestured inside.

Bucky practically sauntered into the room, as if it was his own personal catwalk.

* * *

Hour four-going-on-five of interrogation was not yielding the results that Steve and Bucky had expected. It turned out that the first witness had tried to talk to Martina, but she seemed quickly aggravated by his attempts at conversation. They had ridden the same public lift to the accessible part of the Axis, and he had tried to strike up a conversation to dispel the awkward silence. His attempts at politeness had been frostily received. He did mention that she had had a briefcase, though, a briefcase that Steve surmised that was the same as the one at the crime scene.

This pin-pointed her location on the platform at ten p.m. yesterday. She then must have ridden the access elevators to the agricultural ring, a fifteen-minute ride in what basically amounted to a tin box sliding in zero gravity. Some cameras had found her walking in the corridors from agripod 22 to 23, and ultimately to her death, at ten twenty-five p.m.

Both farmers had little to say. They did see Martina crossing pod 22 to get to pod 23, and they said she mustn’t have seen them since they were doing late-night damage control on some water pump something or other; Steve focused on their attitudes — down-to-earth but with the usual disquiet of a witness in interrogation — while they both pelted Bucky with technical details. They didn’t report a lot of SAF patrols, though, which made the two grunts who’d been walking around all the more conspicuous.

Which left the mystery of the fourth person. The farmers didn’t see him, and Steve had read the CamSec report during their lunch hour: surveillance could trace the guy all the way from one of the science lab buildings to the scene, but then the guy had just disappeared in the pod, out of view of the whole two cameras there, and never reappeared.

Bucky and Steve exited the interrogation room in a disgruntled mood. They brought the last farmer back down to the lobby and then went back to their station. Bucky flopped onto his chair and Steve parked his ass on the desk, moodily squeezing his stress ball.

“He came from the same lab building. Maybe he’s a coworker?” Steve bounced the stress ball on the floor as Bucky poked at his tablet, hunched over his workstation.

“Or maybe he had been tailing her, maybe he’s a stalker.”

“Maybe he’s the killer.”

“Or maybe he’s a victim.”

Steve grunted and draped himself over the back of Bucky’s chair. “Maybe he’s dead.” Bucky didn’t react. “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to find out more about her lab.”

“You could always fill in the request form to get all their paperwork.”

“Or you could,” Bucky countered.

“ _Or_ I could gouge my eyes out and go fry myself in solar radiation.”

“That’s disgusting, Steve.” Bucky clucked his tongue. “Metamaterial plasmonic whatthefucktronics lab, alpha branch. The lab has effectively been marked as closed on their website, and for three weeks, already. Doesn’t add up with the date Amira gave us. Team names are still listed, though. Oh, interesting!” He brought up two pages side by side. “Personnel listings history shows one guy dropped off right before Martina’s lab was closed. Name disappears,” — he sang a fake ominous _ta da daaaa_ — “a week before official shutdown, so a month ago, ha.”

“Huh. Fired?”

“Who knows.” Bucky typed the name into the police database. “Let’s see what we’ve got on Rick Jones.”

Steve resumed bouncing his ball on the floor. When Rumlow yelled at him to cut it out, he began bouncing it on the ceiling. On Bucky’s side of the table, some serious stylus action was taking place.

“Bucky?”

“What.”

“Can we go see the ducts, please?”

“I’d like to run a complete background check on every person on this list.” More stylus action. Steve blew a raspberry. “Okay Stevie, you go look at what’s waiting in the ducts.”

“You research, I check out the scene?”

Bucky nodded as he pulled up a form on the tablet. “I’d like to see if we can get an authorization code to get those SAF guys ID’d. Patrol routes.”

“Hmm, paperwork. Wouldn’t want to get between you and some sweet, sweet fill-in form action.”

“Be grateful that I spare you that pain,” Bucky smirked. “Also, take the travel time to review the lab work? I’m gonna be hip-deep in listings and shit before you cross that threshold.”

Steve smiled amiably. “Yeah, you got it, Buck.” He patted Bucky’s back before turning to leave, but not without bouncing his ball one last time just to annoy Rumlow.

“Meet you back home, Bucks!”

* * *

Steve flashed his badge in front of the support pillar access panel, whistling softly to himself. Between the two of them, it was better to leave data trails to Bucky. Steve just wasn’t cut out for toiling through heaps and mounds of red tape, forms, taping, mails and generic junk in search of one nugget of a clue. Give him scenes and evidence to review anyday, but paperwork? God, no.

As the elevator dragged along the pillar, fighting the artificial gravity along the way, Steve received a message.

_Found something! The guy, Rick Jones, wasn’t fired: he passed away after an accident happened in the lab five weeks ago. Lab was shut down a week later. Incident report only says “experiment melted.”_  
|    
  
---|---  
  
| 

_Shouldn’t we have something in archives abt this?_  
  
_Nope, filed under workplace hazard accident, and wasn’t processed by us so maybe another col administration? No files I can access easily yet. Also guess what? Army went in, seized everything. Who’d have thought!_ |    
  
  
Space Armed Forces, sticking their nose in this, was absolutely not a good sign. Steve had always thought the military was really more of a special intervention force, dedicated to doing first-step implantation on new solar system colonies, which was cool, terraforming didn’t leave a lot of margin for error. But sometimes they also cracked down on Spacer Unions on mining asteroids, which was the whole reason Steve was pretty ambivalent about the SAF in the first place.

  
| 

_Do we know what they were working on? Something clearer than a slap from a physics textbook?_  
  
---|---  
_Nope, you can’t imagine the amounts of technobabble I’m having to read rn._ |    
  
  
| 

_And SAF involvement?_  
  
_Under wraps. Still a no on clearance for the 2 soldiers, buddy :(_ |    
  
  
| 

_If Banner’s right and SAF has control of some of the labs, it’s gonna be a shitshow_  
  
_You’re telling me_  
|    
  
  
The elevator pinged a warning as it passed the first weightlessness threshold, around two-thirds of a g.

  
| 

_Okay well keep wading through those reams of paperwork then, I still have a 20 min ride so gonna call lab._  
  
---|---  
_K. First one home buys OJ, pls._ |    
  
  
Steve smiled slightly and gripped the handle to his left as the gravity became progressively weaker. He checked whether the results were already in from the lab, and would have launched into a little victory dance if the gravity hadn’t been so weak that he was practically floating around in the elevator box.

“`You have reached AXIS — segment — two — platform — G. Please hold onto the handles at all times and disembark with caution. Shuttle in — two — minutes.`”

Steve kept an eye on the files that were loading as he slowly progressed towards the shuttle stop. Here in zero gravity, all his aches and pains just disappeared; he heard his spine engaging in zero-g mode. The stop wasn’t much more than a large platform with guardrails in the middle of a tunnel that ran along the axis of rotation of the colony, and like every other place outside of strictly-inhabitable space, everything here was drab, grey, and covered in warning signs about any and everything. As he waited on the platform for the shuttle that would take him to the technical zone at the end of the colony, he casually scrolled through the different results that Banner and his team had extracted from the scene.

Martina was a healthy thirty-one-year-old with some history of pulmonary distress that had been solved in her youth. She had died from bleeding out, from wounds caused by an indeterminate weapon. She had several small to mid-sized puncture wounds on her thorax, surrounded by severe abrasions and the so-called “powdery substance”. Detailed photographs were attached to that part of the report, pointing out how the wounds were inconsistent with a weapon, and more consistent with acid or some kind of fast-acting melting agent.

“Well, well, well, hello to you too, melting agent.”

She had several remarkable defensive wounds, located far from the wounds that had caused her death. Scratches on her arms and one long black hair caught in one fingernail.

Full DNA analysis was still pending and should be done in fifteen minutes or so. Preliminary bloodwork, though, had shown an A-positive male — not Martina? That was puzzling — and that’s how it had flagged the scene Steve was going to see right now.

Then there was the rest. It looked like Martina’s lesions weren’t the only interesting thing at this crime scene.

Steve was so engrossed in examining the pictures that he nearly missed the shuttle as it slid to a stop in front of his platform. Looking up, he jumped onto the shuttle, grabbing the upper part of the door so as not to end up floating around in the tunnel. He barely had time to latch onto one of the hand grips before the shuttle doors closed and it barreled down the Axis.

Steve pocketed his phone; no sense in trying to both read and hold on for dear life against the accelerations and decelerations of the shuttle. This ride wasn’t made for the faint of heart: technical spaces were all about efficiency and nothing about comfort. This bullet train in zero gravity could take you from mainframe and environmental control at segment eight’s extremity to segment one’s gravitational monitoring rooms in ten minutes, tops.

The trip took a few minutes, and Steve got out of it feeling like an ice cube tumbling out of a cocktail shaker.

Quite a bit dizzy, as anyone would be after that ride, Steve jumped out on shaky legs when the shuttle reached the end of the Axis tunnel. He used the guardrails to guide himself down the several platforms descending into the bowels of the station. He passed several doors using his badge, all adorned with some variation on the “Keep Out / Authorized Personnel Only / Maintenance Hub” theme. Black and yellow, so nice, very cosy colour scheme, wow.

Finally reaching the shortcut he wanted to take to bring him to the ducts, he smiled to himself and shot off a message to Banner.

| 

_Didn’t manage to go through the full rep. Just checking, when mentioned “powdery substance”, is it that nanotech you showed us?_  
  
---|---  
_Yes._ |   
  
Welp.

Loquacious.

| 

_Do you know if your team or another one checked on an accident in labs, around three weeks ago?_  
  
---|---  
_Doesn’t ring a bell. I’ll check._ |   
  
Steve pocketed his phone again and focused on float-shuffling towards a mobile passageway he’d noticed once when he’d gone exploring with Sam. A psychiatric counsellor, Sam was also a huge mechanics nerd, and Steve had found in the guy someone to join him on his little semi-legal “adventures.” Steve could technically patrol anywhere. Except that when he was with Sam, he wasn’t doing a lot of patrolling; however, a lot of gallivanting in low gravity happened. Bucky disliked the proximity of space too much to enjoy arm-crawling through disused exhaust vents, prowling in hull repair areas, or just simply looking at how stuff worked in the station.

He cranked the lever to the mobile scaffolding and held it until the scaffold went down several hundred metres and stopped in front of a trapdoor marked “DANGER.” Even with just one good ear, Steve could hear the roaring whirr of reaction wheels spinning madly behind the door.

Getting the latch up required some manoeuvring, but he managed, and he slipped inside without further issue, closing the trapdoor behind him.

The ducts were several tunnel-like rooms harbouring reaction wheels all along the walls and the ceiling, which made them some of the least-accessible rooms on the station and the least easy to navigate; even with the protective wire fence, it was still easy to end up too close to those wheels, and any debris — say, a finger that got too close? — impeding their rotation could prevent the station as a whole from getting the minute adjustments in rotation that ensured its stabilised orientation towards the sun.

Just as Steve had thought — and had proven by walking here through that trapdoor — the guys who had been tasked with securing this room weren’t really aware of the presence of maintenance hatches.

Steve took his police tape out and turned his earpiece on to get the last of the lab work read aloud to him as he inspected the room. The DNA results should have come in some minutes prior.

First, he absently taped closed all entrances and exits that the cadets sent by HQ had missed. His tablet’s tinny voice explained how there had been two e-S.P.A.R.K. cartridges on the ground. These were the electrical Subduing and Pacification Ammunition for Rifles and Kassnar, appropriately nicknamed electrical Sucker Punch Ammunition, Right in the Kidneys, a nasty little type of ammo used mainly in mining plants to disrupt the exoskeletons of miners going crazy from space fever. It had been known to also disrupt the safe mode of spacesuits and the like, leaving people stranded without heat or air in space.

Nasty stuff when misused.

Someone seemed to have used one to shock Martina, but the other had also been discharged, so someone else had been there and had been targeted, too.

However, that kind of ammo didn’t just lie around waiting to be picked up, Steve mused as the voice droned on about case characteristics. Those were military grade. As Steve swept through the room for the first time, trying to get a feel for the space, he shot off a message to Bucky.

| 

_We need to get those two SAF doofuses in an interrogation room STAT. For real. Milit ammo on the scene._  
  
---|---  
_Fuck. Request sent. We’ll see._ |   
  
Steve walked around a bit, listening as the voice spent a few minutes on a convoluted exposé of RNA decay quality dispersion something or other. He let the words glide over the surface of his attention, going around in a small circle. If he were to come from the pods, and not be too conspicuous, what would he do?

“Blood samples show two persons were wounded. Cross reference to DNA registries matched to Martina Ahmed for most of the blood samples, some of the samples matched to Loki Laufeyson. Both of their bloodwork showed heightened cell decay. Hair samples and skin samples taken from under the corpse’s nails were cross referenced to DNA registries and matched to both Martina Ahmed and Loki Laufeyson. Comparative wounds show the victim might have scratched her own body several times as well as Laufeyson’s.”

He slowly made his way to the other end of the room, where an old, unused corridor had been condemned. This would have minimum surveillance in it, next to zero chance of running into someone. Very impractical and hard to get into and out of but…

“Around the corpse, soil samples analysed showed abnormal ATM FTIR spectra. Cobalt residue in detectable percentages was found. The surrounding area was then processed with micro-spectrophotometry to assess cobalt concentrations. Two areas, roughly a metre and a half wide in diametre, are distinguishable in figure 46 and picture 6a 6b 6c…”

Uh, no dice. The panel was still pretty well screwed shut with no trace of passage.

“Electrical properties of the soil were altered. Further testing proved a 0.5% presence of hexagonal carbon nanoparticles, so called ‘flakes’ in nanoengineering. Most of the flakes were inert. Evidence 21A and 21B show partial reaction to electrical current. Full list of tests as follows: delta function, shot noise, linearity, …”

That Loki guy could have been absolutely unscathed; he could have dodged the e-S.P.A.R.K. Or he might have been hurt by the same thing that hurt Martina. Or maybe he just offed her and needed a way out, maybe he was fleeing the two SAF grunts. Did he steal a Kassnar from one of the soldiers to use against Martina? He had managed to go down the tunnels joining the agricultural pods, and he reached the station, unseen by the cameras. And if not by using the most unobtrusive way, then how? Anywhere else there would be people — citizens, maintenance crews.

| 

_Also did lab Alpha have anything to do with carbon nanoparticles. Or cobalt whatever. Can you check their website?_  
  
---|---  
_Am I your secretary now?_ |   
| 

_Then where’s your pencil skirt?_  
  
Steve cringed. Damn, that was revealing. Hopefully Bucky would think “banter” and not “awkward come on” in that last text. He purposefully walked towards the far-left corner of the room. This would be the quickest shortcut coming from the pods. Not the least conspicuous, though.

Well, look at that.

There was no blood, no overwhelmingly-incriminating piece of evidence, so of course those precious dear police cadets would have overlooked the faint traces of dirt spattering the ridged metal floor. Whistling, he marked the space around the evidence, protecting the area. Hopefully, Banner’s team would get a match between this dirt and the first crime scene.

“I’m a guy, I’m getting out of work, go out of my way to a remote place in a space station and see my jumpy… fellow scientist.” Steve followed the breadcrumb trail of dirt from afar, marking around it as he went. “She has a fucking briefcase… remote isn’t enough, I meet her in the only part of the station secluded enough to have no surveillance.” He hummed.

In his earpiece, the voice was winding down a lengthy explanation on blood contamination. Steve didn’t catch a lot of it, but knew better than to fast forward through lab reports.

His phone vibrated with an incoming message.

_Hey Stevie, my opening into SAF fell through, they are stonewalling already. However, got full list of lab Alpha old personnel pre-accident. Also got Stark on the line so that he can dumb down the lab website for me._ |   
---|---  
| 

_Called Stark? How many years did that shave off on your life expectancy?_  
  
_i’m died, pls halp._ |   
  
Steve snorted, and finally arrived in front of the bloody handprint on the wall. Like an art masterpiece at the centre of a museum, it sat there looking ghastly surrounded by fences and wheels spinning forever.

The hand looked like it had slid down the wall slightly, and blood had dripped down in small splatters on the floor. And there was more than blood in the print.

Steve swivelled around and looked at the tape line he had set up. Snaking along the floor and then zig-zagging near the wall.

“I’m dragging myself here. I’m hurt?” Steve looked back at the handprint and its fuzzy edges; the crusty haemoglobin shot through with… “Grey powder.”

He wasn’t in any dead angles; he could even see one of the cameras on the opposite wall. How could that guy not have been caught by CamSec? How could Laufeyson do that, but be clumsy enough to leave such a huge mark right here?

Memories of his explorations with Sam bubbled to the surface. What was there after the ducts but before the main colony? If he were so stealthy as to pass unnoticed, but so desperate he’d rather flee the Space Fucking Army?

“Shit…”

_Hey, not dead, Stark said smthg interesting tho. Said the research stuff here was pretty advanced. No way military’s not dipping their hand in there. Also says technical description looks kind of like biohazard to him. Is weird._ |   
---|---  
| 

_Is there a Loki Laufeyson in that lab personnel file?_  
  
_Yup._ |   
  
Shit. “Shit.” Steve slowly paced forward; he’s hurt, disoriented maybe. There might be danger, he might be hunted down. He would take the door down to Mechanics. Motors, noise, low lighting. Opening onto the most heavily modded district in the colony. Spaceport segment district.

| 

_Can you bring up CamSec tapes for mechanics upkeep ducting 17 through 53 around eleven p.m. to 2 a.m._  
  
---|---  
_Guh. Are we gonna watch that? nvmd rhetorical question._ |   
| 

_We’ll have our hands full tomorrow, gonna be great._  
  
_Yeah, looking forward to reviewing footage with your hyperactive ass. BTW don’t forget the OJ._


	2. Newton’s laws of motion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein frustrations start running high and someone's little secret has been uncovered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for frenchness, I guess? And vague technobabble :D Translations can be found by hovering your mouse over the words or at the bottom of the chapter in end-notes for those of you on mobile phone.
> 
> Please, enjoy this gratuitous "omelette du fromage hon hon hon" moment in the midst of this investigation.
> 
> Enjoy!

### Part I, Chapter 2: Newton’s laws of motion

One translation of Newton's laws reads:

Law I: Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed. 

Law II: The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impress'd; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impress'd. 

Law III: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.

`― Wikipedia, “Newton’s laws of motion”`

**StdED 2054 of Moon Base foundation, 16 November, 2074**

Dear journal, it’s been a fucking day.

I guess we should have known this would happen someday. The base is growing. People are still people. We are a small community, living in the harshest conditions in the solar system. There is a kind of social contract here where we all know that the kind of freedom we had on Earth will never be possible here.

With resources being finite, we can’t afford to just lose a multimeter. A box of regolith. A sock. More scientists means more instruments getting lost. More soldiers means more personal belongings getting misplaced. That’s the whole point of having a Lost and Found department, right?

Why did Martha come to me? ME? There’s a whole base of fucking soldiers here who could handle this. She said that she doesn’t trust soldiers, they keep us in line. Soldiers from Earth regiments, their job is to know how to shoot stuff and obey orders, whereas “Hiroki, you’re from the base! You find everything all the time! You know everyone!”

Yeah, well, I might be able to find a lost shipment of viton washers. Or the guy who was falsifying reports so ROSCOSMOS would stop sending new scientists. Or what happened in the lunarcrete plant that triggered the power outage.

Doesn’t mean I’m gonna be able to find the who, the why, and the how of the first homicide in space ever.

I mean, seriously? Who do the scientists think L&F are? Detectives?

**StdED 2062 of Moon Base foundation, 24 November, 2074**

Well.

It was Garry, it was an accident, and we should do something about training newbies before giving them power tools.

`― Journal of Hasegawa Hiroki, “Lost and Found operator and Founding member of the Space Investigation Unit”`

To say that Bucky’s day sucked would be an understatement. First, before today had even begun, there was yesterday night, when Steve had come home from his little journey through the colony’s upkeep corridors, wired and ready to hash out their findings and with exactly zero bottles of orange juice in tow. And since the one rule in their household was “no bringing work home,” there had followed the difficult task of winding Steve down and diverting his attention to something other than the case. Bucky cooked black beans to go with what they’d bought at the butcher’s and listened to Steve chatter, which then turned into a lengthy argument about murder rates and statistical anomalies, and _Steve just eat your rotisserie chicken, will you?_

Still, this was par for the course living with Steve. It was tiring, but Bucky would rather have a hyperactive Steve than a listless Steve any day.

And then, in between the rant about segment social disparities and the one about mining asteroid population control, Steve let this little bomb drop: “I invited Sam over tomorrow night, is that okay?”

Fucking Sam Wilson.

Sam Wilson was amenable, nice. So damn nice, ugh. And also a close friend of Steve’s. And yeah, _theoretically_ speaking, Bucky knew that they needed to be friends with people outside of their own little bubble and that Sam had qualities Bucky didn’t have, like being just as suicidally entranced by space engineering as Steve. Which, okay, he could deal. Bucky was an adult. Dealing with stuff, like a champ.

Nonetheless. Sam Wilson was also his insufferable rival for Steve’s attention. He was nice, settled, smart, **nice**. And maybe also perhaps not pining like crazy for his best friend.

Bucky could pine like a fucking forest, no problem. He was a goddamn professional at it. He was also a mature adult who was not at all vying for the total attention of his best friend and who was very used to hiding his… pine forest. Bucky was the stealthiest.

He was also sure Sam knew nothing of the reasons behind Bucky’s prickliness, and maybe he’d just chalked it up to Bucky being an asshole, whereas in reality he was just jealous of Steve’s time and attention, and of Sam’s genial character.

Which brought him back to today, when, after a shitty night spent thinking over their investigation instead of sleeping, like the total hypocrite he was, he’d woken up at six-thirty to find Steve in the kitchen cooking, and once again poking and prodding at his spinal implant in annoyance. Then they had eaten and gone into work, and then Steve had adroitly made himself scarce right before Phillips caught up to Bucky demanding a debrief. Said best friend had an innate instinct for dodging any and all dressings-down coming their way. Bucky suffered through twenty minutes of reporting-slash-Phillips' idea of encouragement, which bordered on getting ripped a new one, anyway.

He got out of Phillips' office around nine. This day was taking _literal years_.

Steve was waiting for him at their station with a smile and two apology hot chocolates. “Just came back from the Specialists floor… Dernier will be down to see us at around noon.”

Bucky accepted the beverage gratefully, and hissed when he burnt his tongue on the first sip. “Okay, good. What for?”

Steve sat himself in front of the first screen and set up the second one for Bucky. “You told me we’d need to understand what the fuck was going on with all those funky bits of tech thingies, so I booked ourselves a crash course in matter physics.” He slurped at his chocolate. “I also thought asking Dernier would be about three hundred percent less obnoxious than asking Stark.”

“Good thinking.” Bucky hummed as he selected the first set of videos and projected them on their screens. “What time frame are we looking at, here?”

“Ehhh…” Steve looked up at the ceiling while thinking about it, a quirk that Bucky had absolutely never found cute and definitely never would. “If I had to guesstimate, between half past ten and, let’s say, midnight-ish… half past to be sure.” Then Steve scrunched his nose, which kind of felt like an assault with a deadly weapon, and should be just as illegal. “I think we should divide this up, you take ducts to spaceport from eleven to midnight, and I’ll take pod to ducts from ten-thirty to eleven-thirty.”

And there began the real shitty part of the day. It didn’t bother Bucky to sit there and watch uninteresting footage of grey walls, machinery and upkeep crews cleaning or checking gauges, rolling bearings and all those bits and bobs that made their station work and not crumple in on itself.

Steve, though, was another story. He lived and breathed for legwork. Give him anything to map out spatially or temporally, give him evidence or people to bug until they coughed up some piece of information. But sitting still for hours on end?

The first few minutes were fine, and Bucky relaxed into his mindless information-review state, but Steve became increasingly fidgety. Then he broke out the stress ball. Then he bounced it on the floor. Rolled it around his desk. He made conversation about that damn orange juice and, “Do we still have parm so we could finish the chicken tonight? It was so goooooood, guh.” Which Bucky answered with a lesson on what constituted, technically chicken parm, a lesson that fell on deaf ears because Steve looked at him with doe eyes, and he ended up agreeing to preparing cheesy non-chicken-parm chicken. And _then_ , Bucky had to focus on a stretch of time on one of his cameras that looked glitchy, thus leaving Steve with no public to entertain. It could only go downhill from there.

Steve had been readjusting the height of his screen for the sixteen hundredth time, or thereabout, when Rumlow came in.

“Rogers!” Rumlow barked from the other end of the office, garnering himself an irate look from Dugan and Jones, who were also focusing on something at their station. “I dug up the stuff,” he declared.

Steve swivelled quickly in his chair and rolled towards their colleague like a four-year-old on a sugar high in a rolly-chair race. Bucky noticed from the corner of his eye that today, Rumlow’s mood forecast seemed Gruff and Reluctant. Which didn’t stray very far from his usual Grating and Lackadaisical, an attitude which had automatically made him Steve “Investigation isn’t Work it’s a Duty” Rogers' mortal enemy. Bucky sighed and paused Steve’s abandoned video, set the screen back at the correct height, then resumed watching his own.

“Thank you, Rumlow,” Steve said, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “That is so very _nice_ of you. What have you found?” Bucky cringed at his false cheer and syrupy tone. Where was this coming from?

“That you can fucking read like all of us, and that I’m outta here,” Rumlow retorted in the angriest tone Bucky had ever heard from him. Then Rumlow’s steps moved away while Bucky squinted at a bunch of pixels.

“You do great work!” Steve called to his retreating back.

“Fuck yourself on a cactus, Rogers!”

“Best cop ever!”

Bucky paused his recording and looked at Steve in time to see him drop his act and roll quickly back to his station to insert a medical record chip into his computer. “Okay, what was that?”

Steve fumbled a bit with the bright blue chip, trying to figure out which side was up, and finally managed to plug it in. “While you were with Phillips, Banner was dropping in on Specialists too. I found Brock trying to pump Banner for information on our case, and then he tried to steer Bruce in a weirdass direction about the chemical analysis results. I told him that I could report him so he’d get a brand new asshole courtesy of Phillips, oooor…” — Steve poked at his screen to bring up a display of a medical bill of health — “he could use the Vice unit’s fast access to all things implants and mods to cough up Laufeyson and Jones' medicals.”

Which was, strictly speaking, not really the done thing here in Violent Crimes. For reasons unknown, their unit tended to prefer rolling in red tape. Moreover, ever since Aleksander Lukin had taken over Vice, the two units tended to not work together, ever. But the idea was clever; Vice took care of smuggling, illegal implants and prosthetics, and because of that, they often had access to a select few of the medical administration’s databases.

Who knew what treasures those medical records held? Bucky smiled, a bit impressed, and started his video again, happy to let Steve entertain himself with something he was better at than sitting still while reviewing footage.

The tapes were pretty tedious, though; he couldn’t really blame Steve for his distraction. Even his focus drifted once or twice during the following half hour, flitting to Steve’s slender fingers twirling a stylus, or to his furrowed brow. He was entirely concentrated on his documents, biting his lips and flicking a wisp of hair from his forehead with the end of the stylus.

Bucky granted himself exactly thirty seconds of very stealthy fondness and a not-small amount of longing for his partner before smiling to himself and going back to the tapes.

“Rick Jones was super healthy,” Steve said out of the blue.

Bucky grunted and changed cameras. He was slowly going in the order specified by Steve, which was supposed to follow the path most likely taken by Laufeyson.

“And Martina Ahmed had asthma. It’s noted as cured. Dates are all redacted, not sure we need them, anyway. Loki Laufeyson had a sucky immune system, got it corrected, too. They all look pretty healthy to me, the three of them all had therapy at some point, but that doesn’t say much.” Nearly seventy-five percent of the colony had had therapy at some point. You couldn’t live in a tin can floating between the Moon and the Earth without some measure of mental health issues. Both Steve and Bucky had seen shrinks at some point, to help with ADHD for Steve and anxiety for Bucky.

“What’s different, though?” he asked and rewound the last two minutes of the footage he was watching.

“Well, of the three of them, only Laufeyson’s implanted. Looks like some of his implants are prostheses, some are just mods for show or convenience.” Steve shoved his tablet in Bucky’s direction. “Look.”

“Wait.” Bucky raised a finger between them, squinting for the umpteenth time at his screen. There was movement there. He thought. He guessed. Maybe. This game of spot-the-difference between one frame and the next was making him a bit stir-crazy. He turned to Steve’s eager face and his pointer finger showing him a…

Fucking long list of prostheses.

“Digital enhancement in his fingers, and a scalp implant.” Steve cited then immediately got back to scrolling and poking at the list. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. Then you have, uhhh, cat’s eyes…”

“What’s cat’s eyes?”

Steve scrolled up and down the list as he answered. “Reflective membrane on the retina, helps see in the dark.” He stopped scrolling. “Oh, wow, a data port?”

Bucky looked at Steve. “Isn’t that used for blackboxing?”

Blackboxing was the practice of having the recordings from one or more implants stored on a data chip implanted at the back of the skull, accessible via a data port. Knock-offs could be real harmful because of the proximity to the cerebellum and brainstem. Vice had cracked down on a lot of traffic in blackboxes two years ago. Transhumanists — those people who had mods and prostheses and had made being part machine a way of life — tended to view this as a secondary memory and the location of their “machine-soul”, separate and complementary to their own brain and psyche, the recordings of their mechanical body to be synchronised with their flesh body, Steve had explained to him years ago.

“Yup. And watch this.” Steve scrolled down further. “His rejection rate is zero percent. That guy’s a transhumanist wet dream.”

“Is he, though?” Bucky asked. Steve raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Transhumanist, I mean.”

Steve shrugged. “Who knows? Transhumanism hasn’t been registered as a spirituality yet. And even I can see the appeal of having records and data from your own implants, and your run-of-the-mill cyborg can have a blackbox for a lot of reasons. That Loki guy is a scientist. Who knows what he believes in? Maybe he has all this because he’s curious about his vitals. Maybe he really believes modded people are the future of humankind.” Steve huffed. “In any case, the mods are really the only difference between the three of them. And he’s the only one who’s _supposedly_ still alive.”

Bucky restarted his video, hopefully with a fresh eye. “Supposedly.”

In the silence that followed, Bucky focused all his attention on the video. On the screen was a grey corridor, which must have featured in this year’s competition for the best visual definition of lacklustre. It was grey…

Until it was not.

“What fresh hell,” he murmured under his breath, and got closer to the screen. He rewound the video again, to the last twenty seconds.

There was a flicker of greenish light in the middle of the camera’s field of view. Then the impression of movement, as if something had projected a very faint shadow onto the floor. It was there and gone a second later.

“Steve.”

“Yeah, I saw.”

They were silent as they reviewed the same twenty seconds of footage once again.

“So that’s why CamSec couldn’t catch him?” Bucky wondered.

“What kind of stealth cloak could do this? And why would he make such a mistake in the ducts afterwards?” Steve tilted his head as the computer played the green tinge and the furtive shadow again. “Are we sure this wasn’t tampered with?”

“The tapes?” Bucky tsked. “I double-checked the consistency algorithm CamSec uses. This is legit. No added coding, no second layers, no tampering.” Was he the kind of anal-retentive officer who tended to double-check everyone’s work? Well, yeah. Sue him.

Bucky shook his head, at a loss for words. He marked the tape and jumped directly to the Isl1-A-D-15-65 camera, fast-forwarding to the same timestamp as the other video. They waited, their eyes riveted on the dull camera recording. Bucky could feel Steve’s arm, leaning on him from his left, a warm line from his shoulder to his elbow.

There was nothing for a while. Then, a barely-there flicker that the automated algorithms from CamSec couldn’t have picked up with all the additional movement from the reaction wheels.

A flicker. A shadow appearing and then disappearing. A few more seconds, and then the vague shape of a head, of a person. Then nothing again. And then that person-shape, hunched over, pixelated as if the camera was on the fritz, a hand hovering, slamming into the wall, sliding down slowly. Marring that boring piece of metal with a dark imprint. The CamSec flag for an anomalous reading appeared in the corner of the screen, the algorithm catching onto the materialisation of something that wasn’t there seconds ago.

Bucky paused, fixing the moment in time.

“What the actual fuck, Buck?”

“I have an exact count of zero clues, Steve.”

* * *

Bucky timestamped and bookmarked everything, like the outstanding student he’d always been, while he sent Steve to retrieve Dernier. No sense in having his antsy friend stay here to vibrate out of his skin waiting for Bucky to earmark new CamSec algorithm checks.

They met back down in the lobby, where Darcy Lewis, receptionist extraordinaire and triple laureate of World Grapevine and Rumor Championships, beamed at the three of them from behind the reception desk and threw a “Howdy fellas!” their way when they greeted her. She might be the chipperest girl in the whole station, and also the thirstiest, in Bucky’s mind. She had spent many a minute staring at his pecs instead of his eyes when he’d passed through the lobby after leaving the Bullpen’s gym. Darcy could wolf whistle like nobody’s business.

Steve was there with Dernier and his ever-present beret, his own statement of frenchness to everybody and their mother.

“Hi, Jacques!” Bucky smiled and prepared himself for the assault.

“Salut, Bucky!” Jacques kissed him on both his cheeks like the walking cliché he was. “Shall we get going? I need to eat very fast, I am hungry.”

“Very fast, huh? Would you like to go to Bishop’s?” Steve proposed amiably. He opened the door and the three of them walked into the sunlit park in front of the detective building. Bucky breathed in deeply, suddenly so very happy to be doing anything other than trying to tell if one pixel looked greyer than its neighbour.

“Yeah okay, I like Kate, she is nice, her sandwiches are cool, but I need a real thing to eat, okay?” He turned towards the both of them and made what could have been a lewd groping gesture but was actually, “Crust, baguette, okay?” — his way of showing how to paw at a baguette. “Real butter. I know a place.”

Jacques turned around to lead the way, and Bucky looked over to see Steve visibly stifling laughter.

Oh god, Jacques Dernier was all kinds of crazy. First, he wasn’t Spacer born and bred like Bucky and Steve; he’d emigrated from France five years ago, first transferring to a mining facility on the Moon because of his background in chemistry. Then, he’d escaped to Island 1 to enrol as a specialist in the detective administration. Or rather, in his own words, “I would have ended up here anyway because my colleagues, they were ready to put me on the electromagnetic catapult to send me to aliens, you know, eh.”

Some people blend in in a foreign country. Some stick out like sore thumbs. Jacques Dernier was more of the sort that stood out and then some. Purposely. On Earth he might have been the six billionth random everyday guy, but here in Space, he strived to become the apex of frenchness, histrionics included.

They stopped in front of a little shop with nice lettering that said _La Pause Café_ on the window.

As they sat down, a waiter came out, all smiley-like and greeted them — like normal, for Steve and Bucky, and with those same cheek kisses — three this time! — for Dernier.

Bucky and Steve exchanged glances, and Bucky was hard-pressed not to smile too much, but it was becoming pretty hard as Dernier and the waiter began exchanging pleasantries and complaints in rapid-fire French.

After this overly familiar display, they finally ordered their meal, and the waiter retreated into the café.

“Okay, so, Steve, what is this thing you wanted to ask?” Dernier picked up a piece of sliced baguette and tore off a chunk to eat. Suddenly all business, his antics were toned down a little.

“Are you familiar with metamaterials?”

“Bof.” He shrugged slightly and munched on his bread. “I know some. But it’s a big field of science.”

“Okay, and nanotechnology?”

Dernier tilted his head and waved his hand around. “Nanotechnology is a very big word, too. Everything you design on a nanoscale is nanotech. It has progressed a lot, because here with microgravity you can do a lot with nanoscale things. They are easier to do, and to use, also.”

“So manufacturing nanotech is…”

Dernier shrugged again, this time emphatically, because half his communication was done in shrugs and cheek kisses, really. “Easy, on the station, that is why we have the industry here. Because Earth, they can manufacture, but we will always have better conditions on the station. And regolith processing is all nanoscale, too.”

Steve drank his water, looking deep in thought. Their meal arrived, and Dernier dived into his croque madame like a starving man, bemoaning the absence of pork in Space, while Steve stirred his salad and Bucky ate his mashed potatoes with chicken. Damn, okay, Jacques maybe had had a good idea in coming here. This meal was leagues better than the canteen…

Steve swallowed a mouthful of bean and rocket salad before coming back to their conversation. “Okay, so would nano… something, particles or fabric or materials, be able to melt through a human?”

Dernier gave Steve a flat look, his deep-set eyes boring into him critically. “There is a few things that can melt a body.” He swiped a piece of bread through the yolk spreading all over his plate. “Like acid, yes. But nanoparticles are just something very small. Metamaterials are manmade materials with a structure very unique that has special physical properties you cannot find in nature.” He dropped the piece of bread and speared it on his fork, together with some of his salad greens. “So when you say melting body, I am suspicious. You have more detail?”

Not having anything on hand to write those details down was making Bucky antsy; his inner top student was yelling at him to Jot. Down. **Everything**. He really hoped that between him and Steve, they’d remember everything Jacques was saying. Also, he felt like a crash course in physics should not be given on the terrace of a café in between mouthfuls of — oh my god, those potatoes were so fucking delicious.

No problem. Bucky was used to fighting distraction at work every day, what with working with his very distracting and very distractible best friend.

“I’m mostly trying to get a clearer picture of the case we’re working on, Jacques, because I’ll admit, it’s weird. Like… everything’s weird.” Steve piled his fork high with grains, chickpeas and salad. “We have those guys, they work… worked, in a lab studying some type of metamaterial.”

“Yeah, and someone gets killed, I hear?”

“Yeah, murder stats this year are off the charts already, so what the fuck, right?”

“Haha, putain, oui! What ze fack comme tu dis!” Dernier scoffed, reverting back to French as he cut up his croque into small pieces. “So the people work in a lab and they get melted?”

Bucky took over while Steve picked through his salad. “There was an accident, with a very laconic description saying something had melted. And then the victim at our crime scene? She showed burn wounds similar to acid, as if her skin had melted, too. There may be a third guy; we’re beginning to think he could be in danger, or wounded by that stuff…”

Dernier huffed a breath and ate in silence for a bit before putting his fork down and looking up at the axis in the sky. “Okay, so the property of a nanoparticle, it’s just to be very small, you know? But if it has… a purpose? If it is supposed to do a task, like transfer other particles or assemble itself or replicate, it can do that, but it needs a power source. Sustained energy can come from the body, or light. But it needs to also be activated, you see? J’sais pas comment dire, euuuh…” He glanced back at Steve and Bucky. “So if there was a nanotechnology that melted people, it wouldn’t melt people all alone, there must be something to activate it. With chemistry. Radiation. Light. Electricity.” He enumerated the activators with his fingers. Reaching the fourth, he pondered some more before shrugging. “It’s all I know, but anything can be a power source in the end. It just has to be strong at first.”

Steve stopped eating his salad when Jacques mentioned electricity. Bucky looked at him pointedly. “This morning, you told me about —”

“— e-S.P.A.R.K.”

“Ouais, ça marcherait ça.” Jacques nodded vigorously. He stuffed his mouth full of the last of his croque madame.

Steve returned Bucky’s gaze. “Maybe their first experiment went wrong, there was an electrical discharge or something —”

“— and Jones got hurt. They shut the lab, but if Ahmed still had some of the tech with her —”

“— when she went to the pod, the ammo slams into her and electrocutes her…”

Bucky nods. “Still doesn’t explain why she would willingly go to an agripod.”

“Or explain why SAF targeted her.”

“Ah, bah, ça.” Dernier interrupted their little exchange and answered the last question airily. “Of course they would be involved in this.”

“Why?”

“Eh. Metamaterials have always been super good for cloaking and stealth devices. Super interesting if I was a general, hein.”

* * *

They parted ways in the lobby, Steve deep in thought and Bucky facing two or three more hours of looking at footage. They both decided that trying to get Steve to review footage would be a pointless endeavour, so Steve went to Archives to get some information on SAF patrol routes and clearances for possession of e-S.P.A.R.K., and to generally be overbearing until people gave him answers.

Bucky sat down at their computer with a resigned sigh.

It was slow going, but Bucky was nothing if not thorough. As he slowly progressed, he sent each camera reference and timestamp to Steve, every time he saw so much as a strange flicker in the air. In exchange, Steve gave him updates on what he was finding, which could be summed up with a simple “zilch”. Finally, he arrived at the surveillance tapes near the spaceport and couldn’t go further; the area was a gigantic exchange platform that also functioned as an open market and trade zone. People came and went; it was the kind of district that never slept. Surveillance was barely doable on a good day, nevermind with a guy who seemed to be invisible to cameras.

Bucky carefully locked his station and searched for Steve on several floors before going up to his usual lair in the Bullpen: the blueprint floor.

There weren’t a lot of police officers left on this floor when the clock struck six. Most of the assignments requiring recon were given at the beginning of the week, thus most teams hadn’t used this room for three days. It was now calm, silent and nearly empty, save for his best friend, roommate and something-or-other and a lone officer sitting in the far-off corner perusing huge whiteboards with Moon maps taped on.

Bucky breathed in and out. After spending more than half his day going cross-eyed in front of a screen, he was ready to bang his head against the wall. Add to that this outlandish case and the recent tendency to touch his back, arms or wherever that Steve had developed recently, and his anxiety levels were axis-high.

Fuck, maybe he needed to… get the guts soon to try and clarify what, exactly, was happening between them. Maybe he needed to admit to this…thing? These feelings he had for Steve?

Haha, no, never. Oh god. His palms were sweating just thinking about it.

Breathe in, breathe out. He walked into the room, smile plastered on his face.

Steve was currently alternating between frowning at what looked like a spaceport hologram and scrunching his nose at an honest-to-god paper layout of what looked like a huge maintenance deck equipped with heavy-duty ductwork. His hair had become more of a rat’s nest than a human hairdo, and his external spinal cord was lit up with its red overload alert lights like an odd Christmas tree.

Bucky let out a gusty sigh and braced himself for what would assuredly follow. He approached and [put his pointer finger on the C7 vertebra](https://soundcloud.com/alpaca-kittens/implant-spine-buzz).

“How long since your spine brace beeped?”

“Not that long. Dunno.” Steve placed one layout over another and brought them to the light. “This makes no fucking sense.”

The brace blinked green again, and Steve let out a sigh of relief before laying the blueprints on the table. He slid a box towards Bucky while tracing a winding path over the prints on his backlit table. “Here, caramels. I snatched the last of them from the break room. Figured you’d like some after the day you’ve had.”

Touched, Bucky swallowed hard and murmured his thanks before sitting on the corner of the worktable Steve was currently colonizing with his pet project. He chewed on a caramel as Steve glared harder at his hologram.

“Steve.” Bucky slid one of the paper blueprints towards him. Looked like a bunch of corridors. Ha. Those were the ducts? “What the hell, Steve.”

Steve finally abandoned his scrutiny and threw the layouts on the table, closed the hologram projection, and threw himself into a chair. His external spine beeped, and he patted his neck until it beeped again. “Sorry. Just… Chasing our buddy down the ducts.”

“That must have been fun.”

“Just as fun as your bizarro phantom chase on film.”

Bucky smiled derisively. “It was _grand_.” He glanced at the prints. “How did you end up with paper blueprints, though?”

Steve clucked his tongue. “The security tapes you saw him on? Can you believe that he went through super busy corridors and then condemned ducts? There was a platform that didn’t even exist on the holograms anymore!” He shook his head. “Who is that guy, even.” He then patted Bucky on the thigh before turning back to his drawing.

And there it was. That weird change. Bucky wasn’t the most touchy-feely guy. Neither was Steve. Sure, they were friends and friends comfort each other. Steve had always shown his affection with those casual touches of attention: an apology chocolate here, caramels there. But sometimes Steve just… hugged him, nowadays. And complimented him, and smiled and hid glances and got shy, and why? Why? Bucky was absolutely dumbfounded, and also very sure he was interpreting things the wrong way. Was he reading too much into this situation?

Averting his eyes, Bucky looked towards the bank of windows facing one of the Island’s mainframe masts. He chewed on a new caramel just so his stupid mouth wouldn’t say something like… like he didn’t even know what.

This shitty day, man.

“So, have you traced his path all the way from pod 23 to the spaceport?”

“Yeah, nearly done.” Steve juggled the paper prints and the station hologram for thirty seconds more. “Here, see? There is a secondary trap you can access from the storage area in agripod 23. No surveillance. But when you went back on tape uhhhh… “ — Steve checked Bucky’s messages — “Isl1-Agr-aaX53, this points to here.” He poked the air and the hologram zoomed in on a random corridor. Bucky was already regretting every one of his life choices while Steve was getting progressively more animated.

They tracked the path Laufeyson took, which was fucking long and with many twists and turns, avoiding the few places they had managed to find the two unknown patrolling soldiers in, before Steve pointed to level zero of the spaceport. “And now we’re here, segment one, lost in the sea of people.”

“This makes me feel like lying over in the corner and sleeping for three months.”

“Don’t, they haven’t swept the floor.”

“How d’you know?” Bucky squinted suspiciously towards the corner of the room.

“One of my caramels fell out of the box, and well, five-second rule ,you know, but…” He twisted his mouth.

“Ew. Steve.”

Steve sniggered and began tidying up and closing down his station. “Oh, I didn’t tell you, but I think I pissed Phillips off? And Lukin, too?” Steve sent a puppy dog look his way. “Maybe?”

Oh hell.

“Steve, what did you do?”

“Nothing!” Steve raised his hands in protest.

Bucky rolled his eyes heavenward, and because this had been a very trying day, he let his head roll on his shoulders, too.

“Nothing, Bucky! Nothing… much.” Bucky snorted and also upped his dramatics a little more. “Come on Bucks, stop.” Steve was giggle-snorting at his side, so Bucky stopped and looked at him, a half-smile twisting his lips.

“Spill…”

“All right so maaaaaybe I was pissed off because I checked and they _still_ haven’t lifted the Blanket over those two soldiers.” Bucky helped himself to another caramel. “So maaaaaybe I decided to fill all the forms available in the detective database to request clearance on citizen records for those two guys.” Bucky stopped eating. “And, okay, maaaaaybe this amounts to nineteen forms total without accounting for attachments and appendices.”

Bucky raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Was this powered by hyperfocus or by spite?”

Steve smiled and chortled manically, looking to the side briefly. “Can it be both?”

Bucky stared at his friend, directly at his cornflower-blue, faux-innocent eyes, and Steve stared back steadily.

“And maaaaaybe when Phillips ran into me in the corridors, I was kinda sorta, in a way, accidentally there on purpose. So I asked in person because, hey, opportunity makes a thief, right?”

Bucky had decided he wouldn’t blink, and he wouldn’t cede in the face of Steve’s blatant disregard for… stuff. Things. The absolute order in the universe. And not pissing off the hierarchy, either.

“And I asked, and you know how Lukin is with me, and Phillips said that my, quote, ‘special brand of grating bullheadedness,’ unquote, would get me nowhere. Then Lukin said blah blah transhumans blah blah, scum of the earth blah blah, behold my superior intellect, whatever, he’s a dick.”

Bucky snorted loudly at that, and Steve winked.

“I’m curious as to how he could have been aware of cyborg involvement, though.” Bucky wondered.

“I don’t know, Bucks,” Steve grabbed his jacket and checked his pockets by pulling stuff out. Keys, phone… “Was he always this creepy? So invasive?”

“I don’t remember… My transfer got approved six months after he became commissioner. He did have a weird fascination with implants already, back in the day.”

Steve turned to his station, locking it up. “And by weird, you mean every person who’s implanted is hell spawn?” In the process of tidying up Steve left his keys in the middle of the desk, and Bucky, used to his forgetful habits, retrieved them for him as Steve strode over to the office door. “In any case, when I told him our main lead was the military and not some sort of transhumanist political coup, he was so pissed, you’d think I’d fucked his son or something.”

“I’d hope you’d have told me if you did,” Bucky quipped on reflex. Banter, it seemed, would be the way he died.

There was an awkward silence as Steve seemed to process his answer and smiled awkwardly. Time stretched weirdly between them, and Bucky gave Steve the keys, hoping that would break the tension. Steve took them with murmured thanks and scratched his throat.

Fucking hell. _Congratulations, Barnes, you are such a fucking mess._

Steve’s phone pinged with a new message and Bucky breathed out. Saved by the bell.

“Ah, great! Sam’s coming at seven, we should go!” Steve said, chipper once more.

Bucky groaned internally. Fucking Sam Wilson.

This fucking day, man.

* * *

“Wow, Barnes, that was tasty!” Sam smiled widely and speared the last piece of radish on his plate, wiping some parmesan sauce and pieces of chicken up with it. “Damn, I never know what to do with those red whatevers when I get the ration ticket for them.”

“Black Spanish radishes you mean?” Bucky enquired blandly.

Steve smiled eagerly over his plate. “Bucky could give you some advice then, he’s quite inventive with some of the outlandish crops the colony sometimes dumps on us.”

Bucky smiled bashfully, feeling a bit weird about being fawned over by Sam and Steve. He was just your average Space-born guy from Spacer parents. Sam’s were from Earth, and some habits you pick up from your parents, like cooking. Bucky had heard that for the last five years, the colony had been issuing a cookbook to all new immigrants so that they could acclimatise better to the shift in diet required when living in Space. Less meat, mostly poultry, seldom pork or goat. Once every blue moon there would be beef. Very little salt, lots of spices, a metric ton of veggies and beans and nuts and eggs. He listened to Dernier complain often enough to know that Earthers had a hard time with Spacer food.

Feeling a bit awkward, he thanked them and then beat a hasty retreat towards the kitchen to clean up.

He didn’t like being complimented. That was a trait he shared with Steve. Putting the dishes in the dishwasher, he wondered how long he would have to stay out in the living room before he could go hide in his bedroom. He could be a social butterfly… but not after a day like this. Today was a hermit day. His head felt cottony from all the footage review, and Steve had been on pins and needles since this morning.

Sam was in the living room with Steve, and he could hear them laughing their asses off, and it was fine, Bucky was fine.

Bucky was not a jealous asshole. For real, he wasn’t. He was mostly tired after a long day at work and would have preferred having a short evening in, watching some stupid show or shooting the shit about that rumour circulating about Darcy’s latest boyfriend, who was maybe her ex, or her ex’s ex? They could have broken out the Darcy Lewis boyfriend chart. It would have been an easy investigation, for once.

Tomorrow would dawn with its own set of interviews, and Steve would have to get his ear implant, and who knew what Lukin and Phillips had in store for them after Steve’s little show? Bucky wasn’t looking forward to being caught in the middle of a commissioner pissing contest.

He wasn’t jealous of Sam.

He was just… protective of Steve’s downtime. Because having him as a partner meant that their friendship could so easily revolve only around work. He needed to have Steve for himself outside of work, too.

Steve laughed uproariously at something Sam said.

Okay, maybe he was a little jealous.

Nonetheless, he understood Steve’s need to see his friend. They just didn’t deal with frustrating days at work in the same way, is all. Bucky needed a cave, Steve needed some distraction.

Two minutes later found Bucky wiping the counter to procrastinate his return to the living room. “Anyone want a drink while I’m at it?” he called back.

“Yeah! OJ!”

Bucky snorted but took the juice out of the fridge. “Wilson?”

“What do you have?” Sam’s voice came from much closer than Bucky was expecting, making him jump a foot in the air before he whirled around.

Sam raised his hands and smiled apologetically. “Wow, sorry Barnes, didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Yeah, uh, no problem. Damn, you’re light on your feet.” Bucky sent a winning smile his way. “So? OJ? Or will you be a real Spacer and get your daily protein intake with a glass of milk like your mamma would tell you to do?”

Sam scoffed. “Please don’t bring my ma into this. Especially since I’m the one to tell her to drink milk.” Ah, yeah. Earther mom. “Do you have kombucha?”

Who didn’t on this station? “You got it.” He turned to prepare the glasses.

There was a beat of silence before Sam spoke again, this time in a quiet voice, easily inaudible from the living room where Steve was… what the fuck was Steve doing anyway? Rummaging in a drawer? “Hey, Barnes?”

“What can I do you for, Wilson?” He answered, trying to stay polite, friendly. Nice. Settled. A cool guy all around.

“Listen, Barnes.” Sam exhaled, as if readying himself for a conversation he didn’t want to have. “I know you don’t really like me. And I know that Steve tends to steamroll everyone into going along with his plans and all.” Oh, holy shit snacks, was this a heart-to-heart? An ambush? Bucky stopped pouring drinks and leant on the counter, suddenly not sure if he should turn around and look Sam in the eye for this conversation. “So when you’re under the weather, you can totally bail out and not stay for my sake, okay?”

Bucky turned around and crossed his arms over this chest. “What?”

Sam tilted his head and Bucky remembered that the guy was a shrink. He uncrossed his arms and put his hands in his back pockets to adopt a relaxed attitude. As if that would help his case.

“What I mean, Barnes, is that I can feel the exhaustion wafting off you like your own personal raincloud, and I know you ain’t the sunniest when I’m around.”

“I don’t see what you mean.”

“Come on, James.” Sam shook his head. “Don’t play dumb, here. Steve talks about you like a unicorn made of sunshine and I’ve never seen you in a mood better than grudging host or grumpy fuck.”

Bucky turned back around to jerkily put the drinks on a tray. “Excuse me for not being in a sunny mood all the time.”

“No wait, Bucky.” Bucky turned back to face Sam again; Sam never called him Bucky. “Listen, I’m not explaining this well. I’m not begrudging your mood, or the fact that we aren’t best buddies. It’s okay. People sometimes do not get along. I just don’t want to impose so… this is my blanket permission to like… avoid me or tell me to go home instead of playing host when all you really want is to go be alone in your room.”

Bucky felt… exposed. Yeah, exposed. Which was okay, more or less, with Steve, but a lot less okay with other people.

But he was an adult. He could deal like a champ, a pro. No problem.

He smiled easily. “Wilson, you’re an okay guy. I don’t want to throw you out on your ass, so I won’t, and Steve likes having you over. I might have had a hard day, but he did too, and you being here is a good thing for him. We might not be BFFs yeah, you’re right, but I can bear social situations if it helps Steve unwind.” He shrugged and grabbed the drinks. “You know how he gets when a case makes him stir-crazy, so whatever works, right?”

When he turned around, Sam was still there, this time looking at him like he’d found a corner piece in his jigsaw puzzle. Or four corners at the same time. His head tilted, eyes opened in surprise. He opened his mouth…

“Don’t. Wilson. Just. Don’t.” Bucky suddenly knew that Sam knew. How the fuck he knew, Bucky couldn’t fathom. Was it the bit about bearing social situations for Steve’s sake? Something else? Whatever it had been, Bucky saw that Sam knew about him and his Steve-shaped problem. About him and this _something_ that he’d never given a name to. It was in Sam’s eyes, in the tilt of his head, in his way of looking at him like those dumb corner pieces. You have a corner, you have your jigsaw solved.

“I won’t tell.”

“You fucking better not,” Bucky growled, and made an effort to relax. He felt like the fortress walls around his secret were being rattled, and he breathed shakily before he turned to take the drinks to the living room, where he found Steve with his calibration light nearly stuck to his eyeball.

“Steve, the fuck?”

The lights changed quickly, scanning the whole spectrum of visible colours, lighting up Steve’s left eye with a small, square rainbow. “Sorry Bucks, I just forgot to calibrate my optical nerve.” He groaned once his right eye was scanned, too. “Ugh, that’s unpleasant.” The wiring under the skin around his eyes lit up dimly and he seemed to briefly have uncannily glowing blue eyes.

“When was the last time you checked them?” He felt Sam approaching him before going to sit on the sofa.

Steve frowned at Bucky from where he sat on the floor. “A week, Mom. It’s just holograms. You know how they fuck with my implant.”

“Mom? Really?” Bucky threw his hands in the air. “You shouldn’t stare at holograms without protective lenses in the first place!”

“Yeah, okay buddy, sure. Come on, give me my OJ, then you can go lay on your fainting couch or whatever, you drama queen.”

* * *

Bucky was spraying detangler over his hair to remove the last of the hairspray, already ready for bed in his pyjama pants when Steve stumbled through the bathroom door, hitting his shoulder on the doorjamb.

“Ouch.”

“You okay?” Bucky fluffed his hair and looked sideways at Steve, half concerned and half used to Steve randomly getting attacked by furniture and walls. Steve rubbed at his shoulder but looked otherwise unfazed.

“Just bumped into it.” He grabbed his toothbrush. “And you? You were awfully quiet all night.”

Bucky pointedly focused on rubbing the hairspray residue off the points of his curls, feigning ignorance. “I was just tired, don’t worry. All that staring at a screen gave me a migraine.”

Steve clucked his tongue and shoved his toothbrush in his mouth, still looking at Bucky with concern, and then asked something that could vaguely pass for “Did you take something for your headache?” if one could decrypt the consonantless gibberish that he garbled around his toothpaste foam. The fact that Bucky was able to so easily decode Steve’s sentence was a testament to Steve’s inability to keep from talking with his mouth full, a habit most people would find pretty gross, yet Bucky found it endearing because he was fucked, right?

“Nah, it got better by the end of dinner.”

Steve squinted at him. Bucky’s inner Rosetta Stone translated the next toothpaste gurgle as, “You sure?” even though it mostly sounded like an elongated “urruurrrr?”

Bucky made faces in the mirror, checking that his hair had lost all of the leftover product, and then moved on to his hair moisturizer, which he sprayed liberally all over while fluffing his hair up. Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to avoid Steve’s concerned gaze and general fretting. Steve could be dismissive, forgetful, and temperamental, but there was no greater feeling than being the target of his hyperfocus. That kind of laser focus always ended up overwhelming Bucky with the fuzzy feeling of his friend caring so much.

Steve kept on giving advice and being concerned, all with a remarkable absence of articulated words, until he spat his toothpaste in the sink. Bucky grabbed his toner and would have moved on to the next part of his nightly routine if Steve hadn’t reached over to put his hand on his forehead, pouting pensively. “Nah, no fever.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Your hands aren’t thermometres, Steve.” What did it say about Bucky that he relished that casual touch touch so much?

Steve frowned. “No backtalk, you had a shitty day. You should have said so. I wouldn’t have invited Sam.”

 _Oh no, not that, again._ “Steve, there is no reason why both of us should be miserable. You not seeing your friend is self-sacrificing bullshit.” Steve pulled his hand away, and Bucky took advantage of Steve not using his hands as dubious temperature-measuring instruments to spray on his toner. “Besides, Sam is a nice guy, so barring a nap, having him over is no skin off my back.”

“Huh. You did spend an awful long time together in the kitchen.” Steve absent-mindedly nudged Bucky’s moisturizer bottle right up to the edge of the bathroom counter like a cat trying to poke stuff until it fell, but Bucky caught it before it hit the floor and put it back on the counter. “Good talk? When you came out, you both looked… tense?” Steve asked cautiously.

 _Son of a bitch._ “He noticed I was a bit tired, is all.” The best lies were truthful statements.

Steve bit his lip, looking to the side. Bucky saved his bottle of product from Steve’s fidgeting hands. “Spit it out.” He applied his moisturizer carefully.

“You still should have told me no. You should have told me you didn’t feel like it.”

“Steve, you are allowed to have a change of scenery from time to time, you needed a friend.”

Bucky was already considering tactical evasions with a quip about his boring ugly mug or something, but Steve interrupted with, “But what about _your_ needs? What did you need tonight, hm?”

 _You_. “A hug maybe?”

Steve smiled brilliantly. “I can do that!” And then he reached out, and Bucky had an armful of blonde-haired enthusiasm.

Bucky closed his eyes, and as he basked in the feeling of Steve’s hands scratching at his shoulder blades, where he tended to accumulate all his tension, he thought that no day could be a bad day with Steve by his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Translations:**
> 
>   * Salut: Hi, Hello
>   * La Pause Café: The Coffee Break
>   * Haha, putain, oui! What ze fack comme tu dis!: Haha, damn, yeah! What the fuck as you say!
>   * J’sais pas comment dire, euuuh…: I dunno how to say this, hmmm…
>   * Ouais, ça marcherait ça: Yeah, this, this would work
> 



	3. Dark Matter Galaxies

### Part I, Chapter 3: Dark Matter Galaxies

A dark galaxy is a hypothesized galaxy with no, or very few, stars. They received their name because they have no visible stars, but may be detectable if they contain significant amounts of gas. Astronomers have long theorized the existence of dark galaxies, but there are no confirmed examples to date. Dark galaxies are distinct from intergalactic gas clouds caused by galactic tidal interactions, since these gas clouds do not contain dark matter, so they do not technically qualify as galaxies. Distinguishing between intergalactic gas clouds and galaxies is difficult; most candidate dark galaxies turn out to be tidal gas clouds.

`— Wikipedia, “Dark Galaxy”`

The truth of the matter is that the population from space, who call themselves Spacers, as opposed to us Earthers, should already be considered as a separate nation, if not in the political sense, at least in the sociological sense. Space government is mostly autonomous; it sprang from a collection of labs, but has since grown into a sprawling organisation made of separate agencies and entities, all working together. They have a Council, quite like most countries on Earth have presidents, or prime ministers.

Hence, the drift between our nations and theirs. And this is without going into the profound differences in food habits, the rationing, the subtle ways their language has evolved — the oft evoked “axis” instead of “sky” — their outlook on religion and social duties, both of which stem from the forced mixing of cultures back when those colonies were merely groups of fifty people cohabiting under frail domes on the Moon. High-tech prostheses, which some countries on Earth have banned because of the “debasement of the human body” they would supposedly incite, is widely accepted as a medical solution in Space. Dangerous jobs, risky conditions and lower bone density have made those prostheses indispensable.

Then there are the people who are “modded”, for convenience, for enhancement of some bodily function, or for show or fashion. Between this and the omnipresence of respirators in the spaceport district of the Lagrange four Island colonies, an Earther ambling down the streets would be very conspicuous amongst the population there.

It goes further. The unique conditions and organization of Space, its unique organisation, and the multiple settlements found there have given rise to a unique belief in the transcendence of the human body. Just as some Spacers believe in our gods of yore, our erstwhile philosophies, others believe that mods, prostheses and implants will give rise to a different human. Neither better nor improved, but a transhuman, both organic and cybernetic, attuned to different senses and sensations. […]

`— Patrick MacDougall, _Times Op-Ed_ , “The Rise of the Spacer Civilisation”`

The following morning already felt a million times better to Bucky than the previous night. He woke up to Steve whistling in the kitchen, his spine brace nowhere to be seen, the round ports to which the prosthetic attached peeking out of his t-shirt, hair sleep-ruffled. He looked like a fluffy bird making omelettes. What a sight.

Sure, Steve’s mood soured quickly when Bucky asked about his cochlear implant surgery, and soured even further when he had to put his spine brace back on and the implant seized several times with a high-pitched mechanical whirr until Bucky had to come to the rescue and help align each pin of the spine with its respective port. Steve tried to joke about it and force some levity into his voice, but Bucky was no fool.

Despite all the inconveniences, they managed to arrive at work on time, and Bucky turned the computer on at eight-thirty on the dot. Since Steve needed to go to the hospital to get his implant around noon, they had decided yesterday to go forward with the interviews of the only three lab Alpha scientists who had agreed to be questioned. Steve would go to his appointment, and then Bucky would use the downtime to update his preliminary report to the head honcho — he had time. Steve had sworn up and down he’d get some rest afterwards, but Bucky was no fool, and he knew Steve. He had no illusions that he would be digging into Ahmed, Laufeyson and Jones’ files alone.

It would go like this, and Bucky would bet his left nut on it: Steve would go to the appointment, Bucky would keep working, then Steve would call around three in the afternoon, fresh off the operating table, saying that everything had gone well. At that point, Bucky would insist he take at least the afternoon off. Steve would say that for three hours of work it wasn’t worth taking the time off, to which Bucky would say that it wasn’t worth coming in for three hours, and then Steve would try to say something and Bucky would say that he knew him and he wouldn’t come in for three hours and then leave, and Steve would be all sarcastic and on the defensive, and…

Anyway, Steve would come in to work because Bucky was powerless in front of all great forces of nature, like tides, gravity and Steven Grant “Fucking Relentless” Rogers.

They had two blessed hours of short interviews with the first two scientists. Neither one had a lot to say. The consensus seemed to be that Martina Ahmed had been a nice enough coworker, a bit of a hardass, a bit of a social climber, and a bit stuck in the Earther cliché mindset that money equalled success, too. However, the third of her ex-colleagues, Igor Drenkov, totally fell into “dish” mode when prompted enough. Bucky didn’t even have to work too hard at it. He gave the usual signal to Steve, who entered ball-breaking mode, and then asked Steve to go get them a coffee. In the new contrastingly-relaxed atmosphere, Bucky all but leant over the table like they were friends, pals, best buds, mates… _And this guy. Oh my god._

“Because, you see, Ahmed — nice person hey, I’m not ratting her out or anything — I mean, I’m sure you know…” _Oh my god, this guy!_ “She was totally hurting for money. How d’you afford a nice house in seg five, am I right?”

“Oh yeah, man, I was totally wowed by their digs. What’s up with that, anyway, huh?” asked Bucky, feeling a smidge as slimy as the square-jawed scientist in front of him.

“Well, she does come from Earth, and she had money there, you know, so it figures, right? But you know how it is, you live above your means, you want to start a fam—” Drenkov stopped himself, as if even he recognised that going on about his dead coworker’s wish to have children was a bit too much. Didn’t stop him entirely, though. “Anyway, she had a good house, and really, there was no effin’ way she would have been able to keep it in the long run, you know? Especially since she was the one who spilled the wipeout on Jones.”

“Wipeout?”

“Yeah. W-I-P-E-O-U-T. WaveIndex Plasmonic Engineered Overlay U-Tunable metamaterial,” Drenkov answered in a rush, as if these were all mere details. “It was all swept under the rug, of course, because who wants to name names in a tragedy, right?” _Yeah right, Drenkov, who would **dare**?_ Bucky nodded with outward complicity and screamed internally. 

“So during round thirteen of tests, Jones got some on himself, and this guy — nice, hey, I’m not saying anything! But such a disaster, truly. I mean, I, for one, had stopped even asking him for an Erlenmeyer anymore, he just couldn’t hold a Bunsen without burning his eyebrows. So, anyway, he bumped into her as she was transferring the batch into the radiation chamber and she spilled the last test run of wipeout — might have been version 6.4, I guess? — and then instead of holding still like protocol says, guess what?”

Holy shit, Bucky wanted to run screaming for the hills. “Oh my god, what happened?” Under the table he tapped his nail on the phone speaker so that Steve would hear on the open line that he shouldn’t come back yet.

“Rick Jones tried to like… pat himself dry? Hahaha!” Drenkov was seriously laughing his ass off. “What a joke. Well I mean, not a _joke_ joke, but uhhh…” Again with the 'oops, maybe I shouldn’t entertain myself at the expense of my late buddies.’ “So, yeah. We were all decked out in suits, it was alright, but run 6.4 had pretty aggressive properties, the cobalt and polymer structure gets attached to outer layers of the suits, and we knew that, but Jones panicked when he saw his hazmat get all shrivelled up and everything, and instead of standing still and waiting for us to douse it in anti-ESD liquid, he jiggled all over, went to the bunsen burner and tried to burn it, and, well… the heat…”

There was a beat of silence, which Bucky enjoyed for what it was and also tried to use to digest the flow of information. So that must have been the source of energy that activated it, in Jones’ case.

“Yeah, sad what happened to him, huh.” That would be the equivalent of fishing, if you had a huge fishing net, the pond was dirty, not that deep, and full of suicidal fish trying to get caught. If the pond was called Igor Drenkov.

“Oh yeah, damn sad, man.” Drenkov shook his head. “Martina felt guilty, but we didn’t say anything. But there were sensors all over the lab, so they guessed early on what had happened.” Igor shrugged disinterestedly. “After that, the SAF showed up and seized everything. We all got transferred to different labs. There was talk that she would get transferred to a lab on the Moon, so if you ask me—” _Oh no, I ain’t_ , thought Bucky, _but at the same time I am. Ugh_. “—it’s no surprise that the full manifesto of materials to be retrieved wasn’t all checked out.”

A new bit of blessed silence. When he twigged that all the lab work hadn’t been recovered by the military, Bucky’s mind boggled. Accidental deaths and now thievery? Where did this case end? He didn’t even have to feign the surprise he knew would trigger another dirt spill.

“What, seriously?”

“Yeah, imagine that.” Drenkov leant over the interrogation table, half a smile on his too smooth-shaven face, bushy brows raised as if this was all an enticing mystery. “I mean, not gonna say she kept the material, but she could have bought her way back into the lab that way, you know? SAF is grateful, they put in a good word for her, she stays on the Island.” This added up with Banner’s warning that SAF meddled in the administration of the labs.

“How do you know the manifesto was incomplete?”

“Well, I was just minding my own business—” _Yeah, I bet_. “—and I overheard Laufeyson having an aneurysm down in his office. I mean, the guy was _screaming_.” He mimicked someone raising hell and tearing his hair out. “He was ranting full force about the lab’s reputation, the ongoing round of qualifications we had on version 6.5 and its new test batch. There was this blond shit brickhouse in his office, an officer from the military, and I swear Laufeyson’s got balls of steel because I, for one, would have not yelled at Space Officer MacMuscles, but he hurled a stapler at the guy.”

Bucky frowned. “Was he going crazy over the stolen materiel?”

“Oh yeah, and he was just as crazy about the military taking over. Man… wipeout has been his whole life for the last two years. I heard him yell that losing the data and the last batch served the military right ‘cause they had no business stealing all the wipeout in storage _or_ his research and then he threw some choice words about Officer Blondie being a cretin and a bellend.”

“Huh.” Bucky inclined his head and tapped under the table again to signal to Steve that he could come back. “And Officer MacMuscleface… you have a name?”

“Uhhhhhh let me remember…” He smiled coyly at Bucky, lowering his voice as if this was an intimate discussion and not a detective interview. “Maybe it’d jog my memory if—” Steve opened the door, coffees in hand. “We could discuss this over a cup of coffee.”

Steve’s usual stony “bad cop” look wavered for half a second when he took in the scene, then he slammed the cups down on the table. “Great. You can discuss it over this cup.”

Drenkov rolled his eyes and waved his hand towards Steve, like, _Can you believe this guy?_

And yeah, Bucky could totally believe this guy, this Stevie, this dearest prickly ass…

“Come on, Drenkov, you want to keep Mister Brick Shithouse all to yourself or what?” Bucky upped the charm a little. Okay, a lot. The man seemed to be responding to it well.

Igor chuckled, still half flirtatious and half tattling, and took a drink of his coffee before answering. “It was Captain Odinson. The guy was always around, no idea why. Maybe because of the military funding the lab? Laufeyson yelled his name, too. Thor.” He huffed. “Can you believe that?”

Bucky chuckled. “Not sure I can.” Over by his side, Steve huffed sarcastically, interrupting the flow of conversation, and Bucky glanced at him, trying to gauge Steve’s reaction — maybe he’d noticed something Bucky hadn’t, but it didn’t look like it. Steve was frowning, giving off some sort of upset vibes that Bucky had a hard time reading. He quickly turned back to Drenkov and got one of his cards out. “Listen, Mr. Drenkov…”

“Igor.”

 _Gotcha, you smarmy ass_. Bucky half-smiled sweetly. “Igor… here’s my card. If you recall anything else that could be of value to our investigation… about the events in lab Alpha, but also about that poor Dr. Ahmed or even Dr. Laufeyson, let me know, huh?” He handed his card over between two fingers, and Drenkov took it with an air of greed.

The moment was broken by Steve stepping forward. “Should I escort you back to the lobby, Mr. Drenkov?”

“It’s Dr. Drenkov, Officer, and I’d rather have your colleague here esc—”

“Yeah, no, not gonna happen.” Steve snorted derisively, and went around the side of the table to get the guy moving. As they passed the threshold, Steve slipped back in to where Bucky was sitting and shoved a tablet into his chest. “You should check this out,” he snapped.

And they disappeared around the corner, but not without Bucky hearing some rant from Drenkov about stale coffee and impolite officers.

Still puzzling over Steve’s behaviour, Bucky shook his head and got up and left the interview room. He poked at the tablet a bit before finding the email that Steve wanted him to see.

> _Flag: Internal mail, Report, Priority 3 From: DPC-C.Phillips / To: DO-S.Rogers; DO-J.Barnes  
>  Have a report ready for 12:00 on the dot. Meeting in my office at 14:00. Case review tomorrow at 14:00.  
>  Room: Special Clearance Room 5_

Huh. Must have been why Steve’s mood was so thunderous. He always hated having higher-ups butt in early on in the process. And instead of a simple preliminary report, Bucky would need to spit out a full-on case review, while Steve would be absent, getting his cochlear implant. He would only be coming back to the Bullpen later, as _not_ per Bucky’s advice, since he was a pig-headed, idiotic asshole who didn’t care for his health in spite of the bajillion augments he’d had to get in order to mitigate his various ailments.

That fabulously idiotic beautiful asshole, god damnit, why did even his angry thoughts sound so fond?

So yeah, that would all explain his sourpuss mood. And speaking of the devil, as he settled at the workstation they had finally been assigned for the duration of the case, Steve came marching back.

“Do you think this is Phillips’ idea of revenge?” Bucky called to him.

Steve let himself fall into his chair. “Dunno,” he answered, subdued.

Well… “You okay, Steve?”

Steve just waved his hand and grabbed his stress ball, frowning at it like it had been personally responsible for the recent butter shortages.

“Oooookay. So.” Bucky swivelled his chair this way and that, thinking over the interview. “This asshole gave us lots of dirt on everyone. I think we can totally go on and work the military angle.”

“Yeah?” Steve looked up from staring angrily at his desk; he bit his lips nervously, as if contemplating what to say. With Bucky sitting straight up in his chair and Steve slouching dejectedly, it seemed like Steve was looking at him from under his lashes, and his lips were all red now from being bitten, which, ugh, why? Red alert! Tactical evasion manoeuvre needed!

Bucky looked at the ceiling as if deep in thought, but really just trying to erase the last two seconds of erotic fanvid his brain had begun to supply him with. “I mean, SAF is all over this. And the disappearing stuff from the lab? We need to know what exactly disappeared. And we now have a motive… But I think what bothers me most is that everyone has a motive?” He went back to staring at Steve, who twisted his lips in thought.

“Yeah, SAF wants the whole… shebang. The stuff. Wipeout, if I heard it right? Laufeyson wants his lab back under his thumb. Ahmed wants her job and not to be sent to another colony. Those are all quite good motives.” He drummed his fingers on his armrest. “Okay, and also, all those guys were in the vicinity of the homicide scene. Opportunity.”

“But you know what we have now that we didn’t before?”

Steve took a second to review all that had transpired during the interview before a slow smile overtook his face. “An SAF name.”

“That’s gold.”

“Fuck. No more nineteen forms to fill in.”

“Okay, you call the guy and I’ll start in on this report. Because it’s already eleven, and you still have that appointment to get to.”

Steve looked up from his computer where he was pulling Thor Odinson’s contact from the Island-wide database. “The appoint— wait, Bucky, come on.”

Having just opened the forty-page-long report template, Bucky felt that this was going to either be a very short discussion or a massive blow-up. “Come on what, Steve?” He typed in the header codes for their case carefully, as if this was the most important and delicate task ever.

“I can’t go to an appointment—”

“You can and you will.”

“—as you’re preparing the review with… with the head honcho and company!”

Bucky’s nostrils flared but he kept calm, kept his cool. He was the calmest.

“You are going, Steve, this is the second time you’ve put off having your ear done.”

“So? I can reschedule!”

“You could, but you won’t.”

“I will! You don’t get to face Phillips riding your ass all alone because of something I did! This isn’t your usual daily case check-up, and it’s my damn fault!”

Bucky closed the file and whirled around, looking at Steve’s irate face. “Look, Steve, I’m not going to war, it’s just a bloody review. It’s not even the review, it’s the prep meeting! And there’s no proof that this is linked to you filing forms out of spite.” Which was a complete lie and they both knew it. Bucky barrelled on, and decided that he needed to hit below the belt to win this argument. “So, you either go to that appointment or I take advantage of that meeting with Phillips to ask that you be placed on leave for the next two days, and then you’ll have to go anyway. How ‘bout that, huh?”

Steve glared daggers at Bucky. His computer pinged, and he took pains to scan his phone over the screen so the results could be downloaded onto his device, all while not looking away from Bucky, the dramatic asshole.

Then he stood up and walked away without a word, back ramrod straight.

Over on his left, Bucky saw Dugan throw a peanut into the air and catch it in his mouth. “I hate it when Mommy and Daddy fight…”

“Fuck you Dugan.”

* * *

Steve Rogers was, of course, the all-around world champion in throwing hissy fits and sulking. Mister Sulk Universe for twenty-six years and running. So he disappeared to go to his appointment without even bothering to eat as Bucky took charge on the report-typing front, and then on preparing the dossier, polishing some of the key elements to present to his commanding officers. Did Bucky feel guilty about the extremely low blow he had delivered to push Steve to go to his appointment? He sure as shit did, but that was neither here nor there. Steve needed to get his implant, and left to his own devices, he’d die of old age with a shitty left ear. Yeah, he had lied to Steve to win an argument, but everything’s fair in love and warfare.

Case review was a drudgery they usually wouldn’t be submitted to this early in a case; Bucky needed to get ready to show their eagerness to solve the case, while emphasizing that he and Steve still wanted to get a peek into SAF. He also couldn’t reveal too much on their new leads in case this was a meeting to explain that they needed to calm the fuck down. Because Bucky wasn’t fooled; coming on the heels of Steve’s little stunt, there was an eighty percent chance that this review session would double as a stern talking-to about slowing their roll and putting a lid on their tempers. 

Not that he faulted Steve for doing what he had done. Okay, a day was a bit early to lose one’s cool, but this was Steve, and they had faced a weird amount of stonewalling about SAF involvement. Everyone knew how critical those first few days in an investigation were, so denying them even a look at the identity of the two soldiers was weird.

What better way to shake things up than throw a Steve at it?

With only an hour to type everything, Bucky hoped that the report wouldn’t look too cobbled together. Thank the stars for templates. He was so fucking hungry and hoped that there would still be some dessert leftover at the canteen for the lunch hour second shift. He attached the last two evidence pictures and a surveillance log from CamSec pinpointing the soldiers, and sent the report at eleven fifty-six.

Phew.

Dugan and Gabe Jones came back into the office as Bucky was tidying up, loudly commenting on the last zero-gee tournament match and how the Ceres team really should have had the home field advantage, so how come Vesta’s team pummelled them into the ground so fucking bad? Bucky tidied up the desk, distractedly listening to them debunking a rumour that Vesta had had an advance peek at the gravity routine; he was piling together a bunch of papers when something caught his eye.

It looked like the kind of scribbled note Steve would leave, arrows and squiggles and some doodles in the corners and a half-finished join five game. What had caught Bucky’s attention was Lukin’s name, repeated several times. Dates, assembled in a loose timeline on a wiggly arrow. Most of what Steve had written was as illegible as usual, leaving Bucky mystified and wondering.

He left the pile of papers and tablets and styluses and pens on the desk. Fuck this. Future Bucky could deal with the mess later. He went to inhale his lunch in twenty minutes, making only the barest of small talk with Falsworth, another officer working in Frauds, and then sped back up to his desk to jot down a list on his phone of the main points he’d need to address with Phillips.

Cues hastily written, Bucky zoomed to Phillips’ office and knocked frantically.

“Barnes? Come in.”

Bucky opened the door a crack and faxed himself inside, gaugîng Phillips’ mood at a glance. Grumpiness levels looked fine; disappointment seemed low. For all that Steve tried to dodge Phillips’ day-to-day dad-stare-laden questioning, he’d always been adamant that official reviews should be done together. And for all that Bucky had told Steve he’d be fine… he missed the lively presence of his partner by his side.

Bucky sat in front of Phillips while he finished typing something. He thumped the last key with a muttered, “Busybodies,” and then without further ado, immediately dived into Bucky’s report.

“I see from your summary you have made some progress on the suspect and witness lists?”

“Yes. We still haven’t made any major breakthroughs, and some avenues have already been blocked.”

“I know.” Phillips turned his computer screen towards Bucky and then scrolled down a through never-ending succession of documents and forms. “Your partner made it very clear he wouldn’t be deterred.”

 _Oh, Steve._ Bucky squelched a laugh and turned it into a discreet cough.

Phillips turned his screen again. “Don’t look so smug on his behalf, Barnes, now I have at least two commissioners hassling me and demanding that I put a leash on you both. Rogers really needs to pick his battles. And I want you to tell this to him, verbatim. Pick your damn battles, Rogers.”

“O-kaay? Sir?” Bucky blinked and wondered what the vehemence was all about. Sure, Steve had sent all the forms to clog up everyone’s mailbox, but Bucky wasn’t sure this warranted that kind of warning.

“Good talk. Run that report by me. What points will you bring forward?”

The meeting was… long. There was no other qualifier sufficiently apt to describe meeting with Phillips for two hours straight in order to hash out and then rehash talking points and arguments and what to say or not say about their leads.

“I should warn you that Lukin is going to aim for the trafficking angle.”

Well, he was the commissioner of the Vice Unit, so that was no surprise to Bucky. “I wouldn’t expect anything else from him.” The few months he’d had to work under commissioner Lukin hadn’t been the most pleasurable. He remembered long meetings, bombastic declarations, and so much discourse on the underlying anarchistic essence of transhumanism or some other bullshit like that. “It does appear in the report that Laufeyson is a cyborg. He’s heavily modded and not just for medical reasons.”

Phillips’ jaw worked. “You need to be the one to argue the point with Lukin. He’ll be on this like white on rice and we both know Rogers and him are going to end up in a screaming match.”

“Sure, I can.” He didn’t want to watch Lukin’s prejudices against cyborgs derail the whole review, either. They needed to focus their efforts on getting SAF to disclose the soldiers’ identities.

“Actually, I need you to take over every time Lukin intervenes.”

“Isn’t this a bit… excessive? I mean…” Sure, Lukin was a bigoted asshole, hell-bent on proving that people like Steve had sold their soul to the Machine God or whatever idiotic reasoning he had, but still.

“Just do as I say, Barnes. I need Rogers to stay on task and for Aleksander not to focus on Rogers.”

Bucky nodded dutifully, but it still struck him as a strange request, for reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Phillips released him from his clutches fifteen minutes later, to Bucky’s relief. He had about fifteen new compiled personal files on Laufeyson and their most recent VIP, Thor Odinson, to wade through. Bucky checked the time — he still had about half an hour before Steve would be out of surgery, and would no doubt try to weasel his way back into the Bullpen.

He sighed, and clicked on the first file, which was tagged _Roommate and Accomodation Governing Body_. He expected this one to hold the classic move out for school, move out for the first job migration pattern any kind of person would have, maybe a roommate or two, some significant other.

“Oh, boy.”

Loki Laufeyson and Thor Odinson’s history displayed on his screen like a five-meter-long papyrus scroll unrolling down the stairs.

`**Citizen B86280-3 Loki Laufeyson**`

> _Request for move with_ : `Citizen B86956-7 (Thor Odinson)`
> 
> _Relationship status_ : Involved (Thor Odinson) — Acquaintances (Thor Odinson) — Involved (Thor Odinson) — Engaged (Thor Odinson) — Acquaintances (Thor Odinson) — **[Citizens moved out]**
> 
> _Restraining order from Loki Laufeyson, regarding Thor Odinson, filed under #5726. Find attached file in annex 5.  
>  Restraining order #5726 annulled as per request from Loki Laufeyson._
> 
> _Request for move with_ : `Citizen B86956-7 (Thor Odinson)`
> 
> _Relationship status_ : Involved (Thor Odinson) — Engaged (Thor Odinson) — Acquaintances (Thor Odinson) — 

And it went on and on.

Bucky scrolled down in fascination, transfixed by the utter trash fire that was Laufeyson and Odinson’s love life. Too bad they hadn’t known this sooner. But it would have been a bit premature to add it to the report; hard to guess what angle they’d need to work from.

After the seventh break-up and subsequent fifth move, he closed the window and went on a coffee break. Pity the poor soul in Living Arrangements responsible for that guy’s file.

* * *

Like clockwork, Bucky’s phone rang at half past three, right as he was scrolling down yet another list, this time showing phone records. How many hours could two people spend on the phone together while technically broken up? Holy hell.

“Hey, Bucks! I’m out.” Bucky could hear noise in the background, people walking, the hubbub of the station.

“Did it go well?” He closed that file and started trying to arrange their evidence in some semblance of order in an attempt to uncover a clue to Laufeyson’s whereabouts .

“Yeah!” Steve sounded much more agreeable than he had that morning. “Pretty well! The doctor gave me a clean bill of health, the ear is as good as new.”

“That’s great.” Bucky felt as if he were in a play, reading from a script. Half smiling because he knew what was coming, he went on, “You going home now?”

“What? No! I’m okay, I’m fine.” Bucky heard the distinct dinging of the tram line coming into the station.

“Well, you can be fine at home, then.” _Well, the Bullpen is right around the corner so I thought…_

“It’s just that the Bullpen is right around the corner, anyway, so I thought I would drop by while I’m here.”

Bucky rolled his eyes and stared beseechingly at the ceiling, as if… as if ceiling cat or something would come to free his soul from this mortal envelope… okay this was getting dramatic.

 _Here we go._ “Why would you come in? It’s just like… two or three more hours until I go home anyway?”

“Yeah, so that way I just have to, you know, check out how things are going and…”

“Oh yeah, checking things out…”

“Yes, Bucky, and I wanted to know how the review with Phillips went…”

“…Swimmingly…”

“And look deeper into Odinson’s situation,” he finished in a rush, talking over Bucky.

“So you’re not just coming in for the last hour or so of office hours, right?”

Bucky heard the inhale. _Called it._ “Of course, I’m just— What are you— ugh. Anyhow, I’m here, so you can shove your judgemental—”

“Of course.”

“Bucky.”

“Anywhatever.” Bucky squinted at his search bar, a hundred and a thousand percent done with the subject, now. “You know where I am.” He signed off and sighed.

That went exactly as he had supposed it would. Maybe he should have been more apologetic, especially after the trick he had pulled that morning to get Steve to the doctor. But this little skit they’d played out felt like a repeat of when Steve had had his colour-blindness corrected. Or when he had gotten the upgrade from the light brace to his full-spine implant. Or when he had had his asthma injections. Every single medical thing was a battle.

Steve arrived finally in the office like a lone soldier charging enemy lines. He told Bucky blandly that he had tried contacting Thor on his way to his appointment, but nobody answered. They exchanged updates in a polite and professional manner over the unsurprising lab results that linked Laufeyson to both the crime scene and the ducts. Then they ended up searching all through the archives for two hours, in tense silence, gathering everything they had on the specific spaceport district where Laufeyson had disappeared, before setting up a spreadsheet listing everything noteworthy about Odinson and Laufeyson’s situation. Their “relationship status: it’s complicated” thing.

In less than two hours, they had scoured all the files and made plans to go check Odinson’s place. The tension was so thick it could have been used as an innovative building material. Right as Bucky was thinking he’d rather cut the day short and leave, as working had become pretty unbearable at that point, Steve’s tablet pinged with a message.

Steve poked at the tablet as if the message had insulted the late Sarah Rogers. In the ensuing silence, Bucky wondered how he could broach the subject of just fucking leaving the office, or maybe changing his name and go mining for water in the asteroid belt.

“Son of a…” Steve beckoned Bucky over while he continued poking at the message. Bucky approached cautiously. “I left a message for Odinson with my contact info and he just sent me an email or something.”

Bucky checked the message. “It’s...“ It looked like gibberish. _Oh_. “It’s encrypted.“

Steve hummed an affirmative. “Yeah, to hell and back, basic tools aren’t doing a whole lot of anything.” He pulled up several decryption results, all just as illegible.

“We should let this run with the bigger computers in archive, shouldn’t we?” _And maybe bring this day to a close, please, please, pretty please._

“Yeah, you’re right,” Steve sighed. “Okay let’s go.”

Making their way to archives, they ran into Rollins being all smarmy at the entrance of the maze of computers and bookshelves. Bucky felt Rollins’ gaze boring a hole in the back of his head the whole time Steve was setting the decryption up.

Rollins gave him the creeps and he didn’t know why. The decryption program started up with a strident beep.

“Ready to go?” Bucky asked.

Steve looked at him and… deflated. “Yeah. Let’s go home.”

* * *

“Hey, Steve?”

Steve looked up from where he was making swirly patterns in his mashed potatoes. “What?”

“I’m sorry. For blackmailing you into…”

Steve bit his lip, his cheeks reddened, and he looked… kinda sad. “S’okay Bucky. I know why you did it.”

Bucky still felt like a heel.

“I’m sorry, too. For… being like that.”

“Just wish you’d take better care of yourself,” Bucky mumbled.

There was silence, only broken by Steve playing with his fork. Bucky wasn’t feeling very hungry.

“I feel like shit.”

Bucky looked up into Steve’s disheartened face and self-deprecating grin.

“Me too.”

Steve stood up and surprised Bucky with an unprompted hug. _Oh god_.

At least they went to sleep feeling less like shit.

* * *

Bucky pinned another note to the mindmap they had decided to put up at their workstation. Steve had gone to check on the decryption while Bucky had moved their computers to another desk so they had some place for the bigger holographic tabletop. Mindmaps were more Steve’s thing but Bucky couldn’t deny the usefulness of the format.

Behind Dugan’s rumbling voice he could hear footsteps approaching, but when he looked up, he only saw Rollins passing through. What the fuck was he doing on their floor, Bucky had no idea. Not a minute later, Steve was back from Archives, hopefully with the decrypted message. Judging by his jubilant attitude, decryption had panned out.

Steve read the message, then passed the tablet to Bucky.

_Please do not attempt to contact me again._

Bucky raised his eyebrows but Steve nudged his shoulder. “Look at the attachment.”

Bucky clicked on it. It looked like a memo screenshot, parts of which were shoddily redacted with black rectangles added by hand.

> From: ████████████████s / To ██████████████████████igaden Nord
> 
> Deploy freig███████████████████████████████████ quadrant. Standby until signal from secondary team on ground.
> 
> Delivery to be retrieved on Saturday, 20th of April 2165, 23:45, Island 1 liminal Space. Access 12b Seg 3

Bucky raised one eyebrow and continued poking at Steve’s tablet while Steve twirled his stylus between his fingers. “And that’s from Odinson?” Steve grunted a reluctant assent.

Well. Curiouser and curiouser.

“I guess this… foils our initial plan of trying to hunt him down.”

Steve shrugged. “We could push for more, perhaps if we badger him enough, he’ll spit something out. He’s the person closest to our Invisible Man.”

“I don’t know, Steve. I think we should wait until we go check this delivery thing he gave us a clue about, and then we can go hunt him down.”

Steve missed a stylus twirl and sent it flying. Instead of going to retrieve it, he pointed directly with his finger on the screen and enhanced the picture until it was mostly a bunch of black and white pixels. “Do you think that partially blacked out word is ‘freighter?’”

“Most likely. And this one, up there, my guess is Rombrigaden Nord.”

“Isn’t that the SAF Spacer-Norwegian contingent?”

“It is.” Bucky closed the message. “I think we should keep this under wraps during the case review.”

Steve went to get his stylus back from under the next desk over, and his voice came out a little muffled. “Hard agree. I don’t want the commissioners stalling this lead, too.” Steve stood up again. “Okay, so… change of plans.” He looked up contemplatively at the ceiling and Bucky squashed his feelings of endearment. “Maybe we should take it easy, prepare the review, investigate the location where this delivery will take place, and make it an early night.”

“I like it. Since Becca will be around to drop Alpine back off, that’s actually a pretty good plan.”

They scoured all the archives and the blueprint room hunting for anything pertaining to the part of Liminal Space that Odinson had indicated. Liminal Space was the nickname everyone in the colony gave to that space between the habitable colony proper and the outer shielding. It was a weird place, very dark, usually used for maintenance, storage, and spacewalk access. Much less travelled than other more mechanized parts of the colony, it didn’t constitute the “guts” of the machinery that helped Island 1 function. It was eerie.

And that part of Liminal Space to which Odinson had given them a “rendezvous” tomorrow night? It had been travelled at a much higher frequency in the last several days. Registers pointed out repair spacewalks at triple the usual rate.

They added all this to their quickly growing mindmap. It had begun to sprawl, but there weren’t a lot of connections being made. Steve had a minor breakdown over colour-coding the map, so Bucky left him at it while he made them cue cards for this afternoon’s review. Better stay away from Steve’s hyperfixation disaster zone.

They both reached SC Room 5 at exactly seven minutes before two and waited like good little soldiers to be let in. Or like a good little soldier and a jumpy little soldier.

“Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you good with letting me handle Lukin?”

Steve’s nostrils flared, and he closed his eyes and exhaled. “You… Yeah, that’s…” He shook his head. “Take the lead. I’d lose my cool.”

Seeing how this seemed to agitate Steve, Bucky tried to alleviate the mood. “Hey.” Steve looked up at him and Bucky winked. “Just like always. You let me do the talking, you play hardass in the background.”

Steve chuckle was cut short by a secretary calling them inside.

The reporting office was drab, grey, and absolutely maddening. No wonder it was only used to report and evaluate assignments. The room was situated in the middle of the building, with no openings, windows, or any other type of overture towards the exterior. Whenever they came here, Bucky felt boxed in and claustrophobic.

The officers sat at a long table with copies of the report that Bucky had written scrupulously while fuelled by absolute frustration.

Phillips and Carter — what the fuck was the Fraud Unit Superintendent doing here? — were currently in a hushed and heated debate over to the left of the table. Riordan and Lukin were poring over their own tablets, visibly irked. Well, that was a euphemism for the thunderous frown that Lukin sported and Riordan’s puzzled look. Lukin’s gaze crossed Steve’s and the room’s temperature went from twenty degrees to an ice-cold zero in two seconds flat.

Bucky watched Steve’s mood descend into “ready to rumble” and decided on the spot that Phillips had perhaps been right in asking him to handle the review. Bucky stared at the ceiling and thought happy thoughts.

“Okay!” Bucky nearly jumped out of his skin when Phillips’ voice boomed out. “Let’s begin, we don’t have all day.”

Carter punched out the authorisation code for the meeting. “Report overview 40 cycle 58. Detective Chief Superintendent Carter, Deputy Detective Commissioner Phillips, Deputy Detective Commissioner Lukin and SAF Liaison Chief Officer Riordan, debriefing Detective Officer Rogers and Detective Officer Barnes.” She threw him a shrewd glance. “Proceeding.” Bucky took a step forward, so she gestured towards Bucky. “Barnes.”

Bucky led the dance with a repeat of the basic facts: the wounds, the people on scene, with an emphasis on the still unidentified soldiers, the main evidence, while trying to tone it down on Laufeyson’s little disappearing act, the tech.

Lukin cut him off suddenly. “Sorry, Barnes, I need to interrupt you over this point.” He took his tablet and turned it around towards Bucky, zooming in on the picture of the nanotech fabric and dust. “Barnes, the rest of your report seems to focus mostly on the origins of this tech, and on a hare-brained chase after possible SAF involvement. I have scientist lists and all kinds of nonsense here…” He frowned even deeper at his tablet. “Have you even thought about black market transhuman dealings? Nanotech is right up their alley.” He turned towards his colleagues, Carter keeping her poker face while Phillips didn’t try to hide his disinterest. “We’ve all read the report, and I find that this distinct lack of thoroughness discredits the entire thing.”

Dallas Riordan just raised her hands, looking both confused and irritated. “I am still a bit puzzled over why we have to involve SAF, so…” Because of course she would be. Bucky wondered if sometimes she had wardrobe issues and dressed herself in military blues by mistake in the morning.

In the second of silence that followed, Bucky braced himself and then tried to answer as didactically as possible, ignoring Steve fuming right beside him. They say that, when facing any kind of authority figure, you must always use small words and colourful graphics. “We tried to stay methodical in the research because of the very few pieces of info we had to work with. I absolutely agree with you on the fact that we have focused our work on a… select few leads in terms of finding the origins of this tech. However, Rogers and I felt that we needed to narrow down our leads at first so as not to spread ourselves too thin.”

Lukin squinted and just grunted. “Good enough. Proceed, then.”

“We looked into the origins, as you said,” Bucky explained. “Some of our initial leads show that the technology was seized by SAF, but only partially. The fact that Martina Ahmed was working in the labs would point to her having hoarded some of the stuff that they created. Maybe this was an exchange gone wrong, but then did the exchange actually take place, or was a third party involved? If this tech is so important, why leave some of it behind?” Bucky licked his lips nervously; he could feel the power plays among all the directors thrumming in the air. “We are still in the early stages of the investigation, so tracking down all the people potentially on the scene is paramount. Wherever this tech went and whence it came from are secondary questions compared to getting a full picture of who was involved. That’s why we have repeatedly asked for—”

“Yeah we know.” Riordan shook her tablet with a derisive smile. “I’ve read all nineteen forms.”

“I only tried to follow the appropriate channels, and felt that our request would get quicker results with an exhaustive approach,” Steve said in a syrupy tone where obedience was pushed so far it sounded like mockery.

_Dammit, Steve._

“Exhaustive. Yeah, I felt exhausted all right.” She scrolled pensively, not looking at them.

Also, fuck Riordan.

Carter leaned over the table, her red lips stretched into an amused smile, and spoke before Lukin could try to hog the conversation again. “I have read that a lab employee named Laufeyson may have been hurt but still alive? Have you figured out the likelihood of Ahmed or him being there by mistake?”

 _What?_ Bucky looked at Steve, who had his thinking face on. “As, uhhh… as far we know, and in the spirit of trying to only chase leads one after the other, we are operating under the assumption that they were there on purpose. It’s pretty far out; the scene is in one of the fungal harvest sites, so it’s basically inaccessible. To be in an area so remote, you can’t have gotten lost there by mistake.”

“I wasn’t asking if she could have gotten lost. My question was more to the effect of whether they might all have been there on a rendezvous fixed by that potential elusive third party. Or might have met on a false premise.” She looked back down to the report and her notes before looking at Bucky again. “When everybody is on a need-to-know basis, people end up entirely ignorant of what they are dealing with. That could explain the disinterest in the tech.”

Steve frowned and replied carefully. “But Laufeyson and Ahmed knew what they were dealing with, they were scientists in the lab…”

“Did they, though?” she asked, inquisitive. “And, more to the point, the unknown other party… did they know, too, what they were sent to retrieve?”

Bucky frowned. SAF should know, right? And the scientists… They had experimented on wipeout, Drenkov had said so. And one of their own had been hurt. But did they really know how it worked? What it did? How could you possibly know all the effects your little science experiment could have…

Did they, though, huh? Drenkov spoke of run 6.5, after all…

What do you say to the superintendent who made you question your outlook on your own investigation in front of everyone? Grovel? Say thanks? Put the objections in a little box labelled “bullshit questions”?

“That is a very good point, DCS Carter. It still doesn’t solve the who, but it may help us redirect some of our efforts in a likelier direction in terms of motive.”

She nodded and smiled more genuinely. Bucky felt the mental equivalent of being patted on the head and being called a good boy.

Without being prompted, Bucky continued relaying the facts of the case. Laufeyson’s mysterious walk through the bowels of the colony. SAF ammo, melt wounds, SAF patrols. He tried to insist with subtlety — an artform seldom used by Steve, who had remained silent.

“However, this brings us back to our request for a waiver of citizen privacy, most notably for access to records and footage of the two SAF soldiers seen around the crime scene—” Riordan scoffed, and Lukin frowned extra hard. “—during the estimated time frame, as well as Laufeyson’s complete records.”

“Barnes, soldiers can be asked to patrol all over the station and all over every space base and colony, be it on the moon or an asteroid or here. We do not, as detectives, have oversight on the SAF.” Riordan pointed at the grainy picture of the two soldiers. “This isn’t cause for a waiver. Two e-S.P.A.R.K. casings aren't cause for a waiver.” She put her tablet down and smiled condescendingly at him; Bucky could see form the corner of his eye how livid Steve was. “So, let’s be clear, Barnes, this isn’t an order to halt your investigation, more of a check-in because of the delicate nature of the subject.” Riordan brushed her long red hair over her shoulder. “Murders are rare, yes, and they need to be solved. Even so, Space Force involvement, of any kind, is a thing no one wants.”

Steve exploded, because for all they had tried to prevent it, this review had been bound to set his temper on fire from the get-go. “But they already are involved! They seized experimental technology which was then found on the same site where—”

“That is coincidence,” she tutted, like scolding a child. “It is very likely that Ahmed brought the technology with her and that seizing the experimental technology in the first place was unrelated.”

“This smells like black market dealings anyway,” Lukin grumbled, drumming his fingers on the table, looking for all the world like he wanted to strangle Riordan, or Steve, or both. “This smells like the black market and you are focusing on the wrong suspects. Who cares about who this tech belongs to? You said it yourself, nobody would go that far off into the colony for sightseeing. This is shady and has transhumanism stamped all over it.”

Riordan barrelled on, undeterred. “We encourage you and Officer Rogers to pursue all leads. You should take all the time you need, but at the end of the day, you have to expect our scrutiny.”

“But!” Bucky cleared his throat and tapped his left leg with the tips of his fingers, hoping against hope that Steve would see and fucking back off. Steve stopped speaking and sent an irate look Bucky’s way.

“We will try to investigate all routes available. Are we to understand that the soldiers’ identity still won’t be disclosed, then?”

“Let’s just spare our energy and focus on leads that are most likely to pan out, hmm?”

Bucky sent a _look_ at Phillips after this very clear rebuttal, hoping he would call off the meeting. Each second more they spent in this room was another occasion for Steve to blow his top off, and even Bucky was finding it pretty hard to remain calm in the face of Riordan’s blatantly insincere justifications and Lukin’s sanctimonious diversions.

“Are we done here?” Phillips looked around, nodded in spite of Lukin looking like he might intervene again, and banged his hands on the table. “Right, I think you made your point clear. We all have a job to do, so Barnes, Rogers, in a shorter version of what my colleague Riordan here said, do yours as best you can. No Blanket Waiver. SAF doesn’t want to be caught with their pants around their ankles. Yes, I, too, would rather have data on a platter and citizen records every morning with my coffee, but no can do. So use your big brain, find another way to bag the murderer.”

Fifteen minutes later found the both of them at their station, still reeling.

“That was such a waste of time, I feel like it shaved my life expectancy by half.”

Bucky grunted from where his head was resting between his arms crossed on the desk. He needed a fucking nap.

“I’m fucking glad we didn’t say anything about Odinson.” Steve got up with a jerk. “Okay let’s finish this map of the case and close up for tonight. No use staying here just to be stalled at every turn.”

Bucky groaned but ended up helping Steve, and they managed to pin all their evidence.

As they closed their station, Bucky could only think about the gigantic hole in the mindmap, where the soldiers’ cell linked only to SAF.

It felt like they were failing Amira. It felt like they were failing Martina.

* * *

Bucky was in the kitchen cobbling something together with all the leftovers when the doorbell rang. He heard Steve scramble to the door, because everything was a high-speed chase to him, and then the door opened, followed by Bucky’s sister’s voice. Finally, something good had come out of this hellish day.

Bucky dropped the last of the parsnips in the pan before he took off running.

“Alpine!”

He bowled Steve over and saved his cat from the clutches of his sister. “Oh, baby, daddy’s here.” He retreated into the living room with an armful of purring white cat, leaving his sister in the doorway.

“Well, okay, hello to you too, brother.”

Bucky buried his face in Alpine’s fur and the cat rubbed his head on Bucky’s nose and chin, meowing. “Alpine, sweetheart, I missed you too. You must have been so lonely.” He felt his blood pressure, which must have been through the roof ever since the interview, go down with each new bump of Alpine’s head against his face.

Becca Barnes snorted over by the door as Steve watched Bucky‘s antics with half a smile. She shrugged. “Oh yeah, so lonely, I mean who is Becca, even, right?” She sniffed the air. “Do I smell something cooking? Gosh, I’m so hungry.” Steve took her coat.

Bucky ignored her on purpose for the next few seconds, just enough time to get the cat food out for Alpine, who meowed again, tail twitching. Bucky deposited his cat — okay _the_ cat; the cat he shared with his sister, yes, ugh — he deposited Alpine on the floor. The feline sashayed over to his mix of lungs and chicken meat that Bucky had scraped from Monday’s rotisserie chicken and started chomping on it.

“Thanks, Becca, for dropping by.” Bucky smiled at his sister and finally deigned to greet her with a hug. “Still no dice on the approval for your own cat?”

“I quite like our shared parenthood situation, Bucket,” she sniggered, and he shook his head good-naturedly. “No, no dice. Job still not psychologically straining enough in their eyes to justify pet ownership.” Bucky clucked his tongue in disapproval. “Whatever. I’ll live.”

“Still. Work sucks donkey balls right now, so I’ll keep him for a while. Does that bother you?”

“It’s okay.” She smiled. “You okay?”

Bucky went back into the kitchen, where Steve had taken over stirring the vegetable mash they were improvising for tonight. “We’re okay,” Steve answered for Bucky, giving the wooden spoon back. “It’s just one of these sucky cases where nothing goes as planned and we’re being blocked on all sides. A lot of pressure, not much progress.”

“Sucks.”

Becca stayed for dinner, and contrary to having dinner with Sam, where the underlying tension always left Bucky more tired, she managed to make all the right noises in the right places and distract them with some light-hearted teaching stories. Alpine winding his well-fed body between Bucky’s feet and then jumping on his knees during dinner helped a lot to stave off another tension migraine.

All in all, the night sucked way less than the end of the work day.

Bucky gave Becca her coat back as Steve was cleaning up the table. “Thank you for coming, Becks.”

“No problem.” She put her coat on, eyeing him shrewdly. “You sure you’re alright? And I mean you, and not your… you know.” He raised his eyebrows in question. “Your ’family unit,’ if you catch my drift.”

Family unit. Bucky scoffed. “Yeah, I’m fine. The ‘family unit’ is fine too. The case is… stressful, but we manage.”

She nodded, then opened her arms. “Come on, give me a hug.”

Bucky chuckled and gathered his sister in his arms.

“You better take care of our son, Bucket.” She patted his back.

“I am the best father, Beckini.” He relinquished his hold, and she went to the door. “Alpine knows you can’t measure up, but he’s nice about it.”

She laughed, and bid them goodbye. Steve yelled goodbye from the kitchen.

Bucky just hoped that sleeping with Alpine making his little squeaky snores on the bed would help him be less tense about this whole case.


	4. Material Failure Theory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein the investigation comes to a head, in a dramatic way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An art chapter! Make sure to listen to the awesome SFX jehans made for this chapter, to really get into the atmosphere of last scene, it's insanely cool, and there's also another piece of art, right at the end. 
> 
> And byt the way... warning for a major cliffhanger.

### Part I, Chapter 4: Material failure theory

Material failure theory is the science of predicting the conditions under which solid materials fail under the action of external loads. The failure of a material is usually classified into brittle failure (fracture) or ductile failure (yield). Depending on the conditions (such as temperature, state of stress, loading rate) most materials can fail in a brittle or ductile manner or both. However, for most practical situations, a material may be classified as either brittle or ductile.

`― Wikipedia “Material failure theory”`

Early O’Neill cylinder designers faced the biggest challenge heretofore encountered in space design. Any failure could lead to a major hull breach that would not be repairable as quickly as in, say, the international space station. As the first designs were brought to the table, most of them based on the O’Neill cylinder model with some Stanford toruses thrown in, a special team, led by Professor Hunxi from China, was tasked with finding the right alliance of materials that could provide the station with the three main properties required:

  * Shielding
  * Absence of material failure
  * Habitability



A fully metallic cylinder might accomplish the first two things, but then the expenses needed to generate a false sun for the purposes of illumination would be prohibitive. Because of their unique properties, glass and vitroceramics were proposed in a bold move coming from a rival Korean team. Fused silica and a Zerodur structure would reduce thermal stress drastically, while also being suitable for outer layers of coating for shielding purposes. This model nearly got approved, but died on the shore of the last qualification testing. Analysis of the recovered pieces of the mock-up showed what could have been microcracks from the micrometeorites test, which must have propagated during the several rounds of vacuum cycling. In a now-infamous notorious video, one can observe the last seconds of the O’Neill Vitro-Glass mock-up, as it cracks and shatters in KARI’s vacuum chamber.

`― Jean-Jacques Hillard, “Reaching for the stars: Failures and lessons learnt”`

Having a ball of white fur purring in his ear all night ended up doing a world of good for Bucky’s mood. He didn’t really know why, but Steve's mood improved overnight, too. Steve made crêpes in the morning, which was a sure sign he was back in good spirits. Bucky chalked it up to the fact that, despite the frustrating review, the “working during the weekend” effect, and the deaf ears their case had fallen onto, they still had a pretty interesting lead in Thor Odinson.

Bucky got ready accompanied by the noise of Steve prattling on about a new sun flare that should happen tonight, exclaiming about its classification — _they say it’s gonna be an X one point two, Bucky_ — and the headache this would surely induce — _do we still have aspirin?_ He tamed his curls while listening with one ear to Steve giving him the rundown on the history of solar flares, letting the words wash over him.

It seemed like the spat over Steve’s implant was definitely over, which was just as well. Bucky hated being at odds with Steve. Moreover, with an investigation on such a delicate topic as murder and the kind of stalling they’d had to face after just a few days of research and interviews, they had no energy to spare for their usual petty bickering.

Alpine climbed onto the bathroom counter and yowled in his face.

“Sorry, light of my life, I’ll get right on that.” He avoided the cat trying to bat at him — he didn’t want to have a paw print on his dark shirt, thank you very much. He tsked, finished fiddling with his wavy hair, and went to give Alpine some food.

Steve was nearly ready, beige shirt tucked into his black dress pants, and had started on his usual “do I have everything” dance —which closely resembled the trajectory of a pinball — picking things up and putting them back randomly all over the living room until he deemed himself arbitrarily ready.

Bucky’s heart squeezed, like a traitor.

The station’s weatherman was also in a sunny mood. Bucky looked up at the axis, shrouded in round, fluffy clouds, and saw the straight shape of streets and squares of buildings up high, grey interspersed with green, and a lake, which all quickly disappeared behind the cover of clouds.

They just had to hope those were all good signs, and luck would still be on their side until tonight.

As they ambled down the corridor to their assigned station, they heard a commotion and glanced at each other. They quickened their pace and reached the office right as a stiff-looking woman decked out in the marine blue and soft grey fatigues of the Space Armed Forces bent over their workstation, Dugan raising hell behind her about separation of powers and investigation secrecy. Bucky spotted Rumlow and Rolllins slinking out of the room, thus adding suspicion to his outrage over the presence of the military woman. Rumlow nodded in his direction before he disappeared from the room.

_The fuck was this?_

Dismissing the thought, he came abreast of Steve as he glowered at the woman. _Hill_ , her tag said (and Staff Sergeant, her chevrons added).

“What do you think you’re doing?”

She stood up straight and assumed parade rest. “Are you Steve Rogers and James Barnes?”

“No,” Steve snapped, “it doesn’t work like that, who are _you_?”

“Staff Sergeant Hill. I have been asked to assess your involvement in an SAF case. It has been brought to SAF’s attention that both our cases may be overlapping. I am merely here to establish—”

“Oooh, you’re like… the military’s liaison?” Bucky asked, his tone doubtful. Steve rolled his eyes and elbowed him slightly before going round the station to check that last night’s case map hadn’t been tampered with. Hill followed him with her eyes, betraying nothing on her stony face. “Is SAF finally going to share?”

She turned her focus back to Bucky. “I am merely here to see that our investigations don’t overlap, but nonetheless cover the full scope of our… issue.”

Way to be vague. “Great. So what is your _scope_?” Bucky didn’t hesitate to make air quotes, like the nerd he was. “Any chance it covers Martina Ahmed’s murder and you already know the culprit? Cause we’re all ears.”

Steve poked at their screens with a stylus, and then at their tablets. He looked up at Bucky and quirked an eyebrow. So she hadn’t gone past the multiple firewalls and the password protection.

“We are investigating theft, possession of stolen goods, breach of clearance levels two and one, and diffusion of data under clearance levels two and one.” She tilted her head. “Murder?”

He tilted his head the same way she did. “You heard right.” She looked aggravated by his mimicry, just as planned.

“SAF has no open murder cases.”

“Well, I sure hope so, since murder and all class four violent crimes fall under Island detective purview. Do you know anything about the two soldiers on patrol near the agricultural ring last Tuesday night and their whereabouts from ten p.m. Tuesday to, let’s say…” Steve mouthed two from behind her back. “Two a.m. on Wednesday?”

She shook her head, betraying nothing on her face. “There are several patrols around the colony at all times and many comings and goings to and from the spaceport because of the back-and-forth shifts from the Moon and the mining operations.”

Bucky refrained from rolling his eyes, but Steve didn’t. “I think I might be hearing a no on my question here.” Steve came back to his side and crossed his arms over his chest. “And patrols are contained to the docks, mainframe and hull.”

“I think you might be hearing whatever you’d like, sir. Your question was very imprecise and patrols are numerous.”

“Our waiver requests notwithstanding, are you really going to say that you don’t know anything about the two guys who just happened to be at a crime scene where there is a very high chance that some goods with a clearance level one or two or whatever, might have been brought?” Now he was crossing his arms, too.

She furrowed her brow and stared at them accusingly. “Any and all property of the military, of any clearance level, cannot be kept without it being a breach of security. You do understand that?” Hell, was she implying they had to fork over the tech from the evidence locker?

Steve narrowed his eyes. “Excuse me, but is that a threat or a justification?”

She opened her mouth to answer — and her answer looked like it would displease them both hugely — but was interrupted by raised voices in the corridor. They heard Lukin distinctly cursing Riordan out before the Commissioner burst into the room. He was frowning so much that his eyebrows would soon fuse with his mustache, surely creating the first known blackhole of reprimand.

He pointed at Hill as Rumlow sidled in behind Lukin, looking like the cat that got the canary. “You. Get out,” Lukin hissed.

“Sir, I am here under permission from—”

“I don’t give two shits about your permission.” Lukin snapped his fingers. “Rumlow, Rollins, go on, escort that person out of my building.”

“Sir!”

“Got it, boss.” Rumlow approached the staff sergeant with a smile, Rollins on his heels. “Okay… Hill. Let’s go take a walk outside.” He grabbed her arm and she looked ready to fight him, but must have assessed the situation in a split second, recognizing that this was the worst time to kick up a fuss, surrounded by hostile officers.

She protested one last time, nonetheless. “Your liaison officer approved—”

Lukin ignored her and turned to Bucky and Steve. He looked at Bucky, but then froze visibly when his gaze fell on Steve. He quite obviously ignored Steve, then, and addressed Bucky, specifically. “Detective Officer Barnes? I’d like to speak with you. My office.”

He then whirled around and stalked out of the room. Rumlow was now frog-marching Hill out the door, Rollins in tow, leaving Bucky and Steve there in the middle of the office. Dugan was swearing about the military thinking themselves royalty, being “just as nosy and a hundred percent more useless.”

Steve and Bucky looked at each other and in silent communication agreed to table all of this until later. “I’m gonna go see Lukin.”

Steve acquiesced. “I’m going to try to dig into… whatever happened here. Who that Hill person is.”

“Meet you back here, then.”

Bucky turned to go, but Steve stopped him with a hand on his elbow. “Bucky? Just… Be careful about Lukin.”

At a loss for what to say to that, Bucky simply nodded before making his way to Lukin’s office.

* * *

It was a well-known fact that Lukin kind of hated Steve. Why? No one really knew. Steve had told Bucky a year ago that he thought it was about his implants and Lukin assuming he was a transhumanist. Anyhow, his dislike had been made clear through very public sneering and disdain. Bucky remembered how, fresh out of the academy, they had been assigned to the so-called Vice Unit, then headed by Commissioner Coulson, a pen-pusher who at least wasn’t prejudiced. Once Lukin had taken over, though, Steve had quickly been shifted over to Carter’s Fraud Unit after several start-of-the-week assignment distributions gone horribly wrong.

Lukin had liked Bucky, which okay, why not? But he wasn’t overly fond of the man, and he had missed having Steve by his side. They had managed to get assigned a joint case with Fraud about some crazy wildcat smuggling as a cover for an embezzlement scam as a cover for implant trafficking. Lukin, upon seeing him working with Steve again, seemed to have taken this as treachery, and had been a pain in the ass about it. The case had been overly convoluted and far-reaching. It had cinched their transfer to the Violent Crime Unit. A boon: by that point, Lukin had been nearly unbearable. Bucky would never say this to Steve, though; he didn’t need anymore ammunition for his hatred of the Commissioner, and neither of them needed to make enemies upstairs.

Good times.

Bucky tried to arrange his thoughts and clear his head; facing Lukin always required a good, clear, cool head. All that and more.

He knocked and announced himself as if this was a roll call. “Detective Officer Barnes.”

“Come in, Detective Officer Barnes.” Lukin loved titles and ranks.

Bucky opened the door and walked across the small office, sitting down in front of Lukin as the man stopped typing on his tablet. To Bucky’s surprise, Lukin smiled amiably. “I am sorry for what happened. It seems that Dallas Riordan, or whoever might have taken the initiative to send that staff sergeant in there, has us confused with some kind of branch of the army.”

This was so ironically funny when Bucky knew how much Lukin liked to be addressed like a military superior officer. “Yes, sir.”

“But this is mere inconvenience.” He waved a hand dismissively. “I wanted you here to discuss the details of your case, Barnes, because I feel that people have been consciously trying to… let’s say… railroad you into taking this investigation in ludicrous directions.”

“Yes, sir, you’re right, sir.” Bucky refrained from biting his lip, squelching his nervous habit.

Lukin scrolled down on his tablet and then turned it over to Bucky. “Don’t get me wrong, I know that the origins of this technology are of interest to the case. The trafficking angle of course makes it my business, too. And the fact that no waiver has been accepted for the two possible military witnesses is cause for concern. The army is adamant that they have nothing to do with this case, that everything is coincidence, etcetera.”

Bucky frowned, but nodded. This was summarily what they had been told for the last three days. He looked at the tablet, which showed several locations in the spaceport district, as well as pictures of known transhumanist philosophers. Also Laufeyson. Bucky raised his eyes again, and looked at Lukin directly.

“Yes, Detective Officer Barnes, I know what your approach is. I know also how… resolute your partner can be. But the fact that so few leads have been explored in the transhumanist community is of concern to me.”

God, was Lukin going to hop up on his soapbox again? Now? Bucky bit his lip, picking through his thoughts, choosing his words carefully, because he knew that in a sense, Lukin was right. Smuggling was in Vice’s purview. But he was right for all the wrong reasons. “Sir, you have to know that since the military has been blocking us for three days now, we are gearing up to change course and try to find this Laufeyson individual.” Bucky glanced quickly at the blinking spots on the map displayed on the tablet. “He might be the only accessible witness to what happened in agricultural pod 23.”

Lukin smiled, and it was close to condescending. “And you are sure that your partner won’t be biased in this case?” He grimaced, like the smile of someone trying to forewarn another person, but admitting defeat. “I know you, Barnes, you are one of the best here. I was very… sad to have to let you go. I understand the pressure under which you are now operating. A murder case which doesn’t seem to be open and shut?” He tutted. “This would be frustrating for anybody. Do not hesitate to reach out to me. You will need all the resources you can, in addition to your natural insight.”

This was getting so weird. This paternalistic schtick made him think about pod people. “You think there is a connection between Laufeyson, the murder and… something else entirely?”

Lukin rubbed his moustache, as if thoughtful and undecided. Bucky groaned internally at the display; the man was a pretty shit actor. “Tough question. I wouldn’t want to say anything so definitive… It is really difficult to know at this stage.” He faux-sighed. “It just feels like too much of a coincidence, you know?”

Was there nobody to save him from all the faux sighs, the faux consideration and the false pretences, under which there were very real motivations? “Oh, I see, sir. Hmmm…” _Yeah, let’s hem and haw like this is Theater 101_. “We should definitely look into that and try to see if any connections emerge.”

“You do that, Barnes.” He slid a small data drive his way and nodded. “Take this with you, but use it with discretion. Dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir.” Bucky stood up as Lukin took his tablet back, so he managed to catch a glimpse of the title of the document Lukin had been working on. Tailing and stakeout orders. Yeah, Bucky had learned a lot while in Vice, but by all that was holy, he wasn’t mad to be gone.

He wasn’t really suited for all that cloak and dagger shit.

* * *

Steve was nowhere to be seen when Bucky got back to their station, so he took the chance to review what Lukin had given him before showing it to Steve.

The file was pretty thorough if a bit — well, _a lot_ — biased. How Lukin got his hands on so much information, intelligence and data, Bucky had no clue. A lot of what was used there was not available on regular citizen files. This attested to weeks, maybe months of work, of piecing together surveillance, registries, files and cases.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. This was nuts. And it would be easy to say that it was Lukin-nuts but this, if true, was also generally nuts.

Everything was centred on the spaceport segment, seg one, all sections of both Island one and two. Felony rates, theft, violent crime rates by district, even by individual streets. Transhumanist hotspots: the bars, the meeting points, the chip parlours, and prominent transhumanist figures and their comings and goings. And all of this information was aggregated into a map whose overview looked a bit like intermingling spider webs, reaching far out into the less-travelled parts of seg one and focusing on four main points.

A temporal sliding scale showed how much activity had increased in the last year or so. Bucky spent a minute sliding the scale backwards and forwards, mesmerised by the slow spread of the web, like roots or the tentacles of hundred-limbed octopi.

He finally tapped on Laufeyson’s icon and watched as his movements were traced — which, wow, illegal much, Lukin? — all over the segment. He seemed like a regular at several different bars, and also a chip parlour.

This was overstepping Vice’s boundaries in so many ways. Bucky couldn’t fathom the reason why Lukin would give this to him in the first place. And no way was Steve going to look at this for more than one second and not blow a gasket. Bucky himself was hovering between shocked and scandalised. What the fuck was he supposed to do with this? He had no clue if this was the result of a broader case he had no inkling existed. Maybe he’d need to discuss this with Phillips? Surely Lukin wouldn’t _give_ him illegal data?

He had to make a decision before going to hunt down his partner.

Fuck it.

Bucky quickly compared the route he had decided on with Steve yesterday with the map Lukin had given him, and saw that the locations they had intended to pass by were pretty close to those hotspots. Not wanting to go further down this rabbit hole, Bucky tucked the drive away in his own satchel, far from prying eyes. No need for Steve to find it before Bucky had decided what the fuck to do. Then he got up to try and find his lost partner.

Steve was in the lobby, engrossed in a discussion with none other than Darcy Lewis. When she saw Bucky, she brightened even more. He approached the two of them warily and was greeted by Darcy winking at him before he had even reached the desk.

“Hey Bucky!” She popped a bubble with her gum. “What’s up, dude?”

“Just looking for my wayward partner.”

Steve grinned at him. “Darcy here was telling me all about what transpired between our dear staff sergeant and Rumlow.”

Detectives love gossips, and Bucky was still convinced that Darcy had been hired at the lobby desk for just this reason. His personal theory was that she showed up out of the blue with a CV as simple as: “I love to dish, yo,” and was hired on the spot.

“I swear, I think he was trying to grill her or something, Steve.”

“You sure it wasn’t his naturally grating personality and some patented foot-in-mouth?”

“Nope!” She shook her hair and flipped it over her shoulder. “Like, he had this attitude, the one you all have, the ‘start talking, rascal!’ glare when you begin interrogating people. So, yeah. Totally asking her questions. Pointed questions. And also he was going on about patrols in the spaceport.”

“Did she say anything?”

“Ehh.” Darcy wiggled her hand. “Nah, but you know how y’all do that thing where you’re more like asking questions for the reactions and not the answers? Right? Yeah?” Bucky and Steve nodded, since she looked like she wanted them to confirm that they really knew the oldest tricks in the book. “Well, it was that. He was doing that. She was pretty impassive though. Got a little angry somewhere around the middle.”

Steve and Bucky both leaned forward, their arms resting on the lobby counter. Darcy smiled sunnily, drinking up the attention. “Okay, so I think I heard him mention something about maintenance corridor patrols? And them being normally regulated by the station? I think she got pretty furious after that. He was, like, toooooootally implying that he knew their patrol routes and that they were going places they shouldn’t or at times they shouldn’t or something like that.” She grinned.

Steve grinned too. “Thanks, Darcy. Bucky’s next workout is on Monday morning. You should change your shift.”

“Aw, yeah, baby!”

She looked over the Moon, but Bucky was scandalised. “You sold me out?”

Steve ignored him and waved goodbye to Darcy, dragging Bucky towards the bank of elevators.

“You sold me out?” he repeated when they climbed in.

Steve turned to face him, still all smiles. “You know those mint chocolate biscuit things you like?”

“What?” Bucky reeled at the change of subject but rallied quickly. “You used my workouts as bargaining chips!”

The elevator doors dinged as they opened and Steve patted him on the shoulder before getting out. “Yeah, but I found Dugan’s secret stash so you can drown your sorrow in biscuits!”

“Steve!” Bucky went out after him. “Steve, you know how she goes all female gaze on me after the gym! How could you?”

“Come on, you big baby, you like people looking at you!”

“But not the ogling! Ugh!” He dragged his hands down his cheeks, pulling the skin down in a gesture of despair. “And I can’t change my Monday gym slot ‘cause everyone has already taken their reservations, this is a nightmare!”

Steve dug around in one of the drawers at Dugan’s deserted station and took out a packet of chocolate mint biscuits. “Here, everything will be okay.”

Bucky dug into the packet and rage-ate several biscuits in a row. “I hate you so much. I feel like crying. I took Monday mornings just so she wouldn’t comment on my hair or my shoulders or my ass, damnit.” He munched on biscuit number too-many-already. “Damn, what are these things made of, I swear.”

Steve might have looked momentarily guilty, but only momentarily, and with only a smidge of guilt before he smiled cockily again. He went over to their station and took his and Bucky’s tablet, poking it to wake the screen up. “At the price they sell them, I’d say cocaine and a single dodo feather.” Steve turned the tablet towards him. “You changed the route. Is that what Lukin asked you in his office for?”

Bucky nodded because he couldn’t talk. Because he was stuffing his face with Dugan’s dodo-cocaine biscuits.

Steve frowned down at the tablet, scrolling and typing. “Why did you flag this, oh. Laufeyson’s regular haunting places, I see… Wonder where he found those details on Laufeyson…”

Bucky wisely decided to stuff his mouth with another biscuit before shrugging, and managed to avoid the topic — maybe he’d broach it on Monday — all through their trip to the equipment floor, where they geared themselves up for light surveillance with street wear. A discreet body-cam, a lightweight respirator mask and goggles with handy data overlays and secondary recording device, as was customary when venturing into the spaceport, an earpiece — Steve waxed lyrical about finally being able to have an earpiece in his left ear —and a defensive weapon. They had dithered over those for a long time —weaponry was an administrative pain in the ass. In the end, what decided them was the irate glower of the guys charged with giving them their gear, and the likelihood of encountering SAF. They took their clunky weaponry and escaped the judging eyes of that day’s quartermaster.

From there, they took the tram to the spaceport, reviewing once more the places that they wanted to hit. Once there, Steve became much more engrossed in looking at likely exit points and routes that Laufeyson could have credibly taken and was too busy to resume asking about the origin of the data.

The spaceport was both the least and most luminous segment of all. It was all shadowy alleys and fluorescent lights blinking in the semi-darkness. It didn’t look brand spanking new and bright and clean like all other segments. Too much traffic, looser regulations on construction and commerce. People from all over came here, often transient, their stays full of deals and negotiations. The district was densely populated, buildings spreading as far as the border with the windows that looked out into space. Bucky couldn’t fathom waking up every morning and going out onto your balcony to gaze into the empty darkness, but “you do you,” as they say.

They walked down one of the side streets, where buildings on both sides had been constructed and then joined together across the street to form tunnel-like sections. Neon signs blinked on every façade and shopfront. A break in the ceiling brought some hazy light into the dark street, illuminating a group of several people gathered around an open gambling table, not that far from the entrance of the seedy prosthetic shop they wanted to scope out first.

Bucky looked at Steve, who shrugged. It seemed like their presence wasn’t bothering anybody. They observed the scene for a bit, trying to get a feel for the place. Dockers were haggling over bulk helium prices several paces away, but Steve’s attention seemed to be on the gambling table. The street was very noisy, even standing to the side near a deserted doorway. Steve touched Bucky’s elbow and pointed at something far down through the colourful twilight at the end of the street.

In front of the very same prosthetics shop stood two figures. One was tall, broad, a burly man with dirty blonde hair cropped short. Arms corded with muscles big enough to make Bucky think they were enhanced. His clothes looked weird, for some reason that Bucky couldn’t pinpoint at the moment because…

Because right in front of him stood none other than Loki Laufeyson, in the flesh, face visible and looking indignant.

“Steve.” He stood up straighter and murmured, “Fuck, it’s him.”

Steve very briefly gripped his elbow tighter and nodded. “That was easier than I thought it would be.” He tilted his head oh so slightly. “What do we do?”

Bucky tapped his earpiece. “We need to take him in.”

Steve nodded. “That blonde guy looks military.”

“Weapons then.”

As he said that, Laufeyson raised a hand in front of the big guy’s face, as if interrupting him. He turned his head just a smidge, like he didn’t want to hear what the guy was saying; it was just enough of a turn, though, for his eyes to lock with Bucky’s for a brief instant.

They reflected the light, shining neon bright in the semi-darkness of the street. Laufeyson smiled.

“He saw us.” Bucky drew his weapon out and heard Steve do the same. He walked into the street.

“VCU! Loki Laufeyson, you-”

The burly man’s head swivelled around, his posture tense, and he spotted Bucky and Steve. It was impossible to tell what he looked like; his face was hidden behind a respirator and a pair of reflective goggles just like theirs. The scene froze, suspended in time, with Steve and Bucky yelling halfway down the street, weapons low, and Laufeyson and the other man poised in the infinitely short moment before the action began.

Bucky didn’t have time to finish his sentence before Laufeyson gripped the other man’s sleeveless vest and, in a startling demonstration of strength, threw him towards Steve and Bucky before taking off running.

“Shit! I’ll take Laufeyson!” Bucky shoved his weapon back into his holster and took off.

“Roger that!” Steve’s voice exclaimed in his ear.

Bucky ran like hell towards the building that Laufeyson had disappeared into, shoving a docker out of his way. He wrenched the door to the building open and stopped for less than half a second, hearing noises upstairs. He took the stairs three by three, sprinting to the first landing, where he barged through the first doorway left open.

He caught a glimpse of Laufeyson running down a hallway. Scantily clad men and women huddled in a corner as Bucky ran past them and busted through another door into a darkly-lit strip club backroom. He looked around at the dimly lit corners and the pink strobe light. Patrons were lounging in the dark watching pole-dancing bodies, servers were milling about. Someone gasped on his left as he advanced slowly into the room, but he didn’t have the attention to spare.

Movement further away into the room caught his eye and the overlay on his goggles blinked. He spun around. He couldn’t see anyone, but a door was slowly closing on itself.

He took off, jumping over a couch and then onto a podium. One of the dancers yelped as he propelled himself onto the stage and slid across the catwalk to the other side. Behind him, people were yelling, but he had already grabbed the doorframe and launched himself into another stairwell.

“Laufeyson!” he yelled, thundering up the stairs. He heard the crash of another door and reached it seconds after Laufeyson, and when he got it open, he found himself on the roof.

Laufeyson was running full-tilt towards the edge of the building.

“Hey!” Bucky ran, his legs pumping like crazy, his heartbeat like thunder in his ears. He ran blindly as fast as he could, and when Laufeyson jumped off the building, he didn’t think.

He didn’t think.

He jumped off.

The funny thing about jumping off of buildings is how rarely you realise that the average distance a human is able to jump is not the standard measurement used by builders when designing a building block.

There they both were, suspended in the air for a split second between the two buildings, several metres above the neon-lit street. Bucky felt his breath taken away; he raised his arms, as if flapping about would help him fly over to the other side.

Laufeyson crashed into the edge of the building but managed to catch hold of the parapet. He caught something, a pipe maybe, and pulled himself onto the roof. As if in slow motion, Bucky saw the rooftop slowly disappear as he fell short of the edge.

He only had time to bring his arms up in front of his face before he crashed into the wall, bounced off and, fuck, was this how he was going to die?

Was it!? Holy shi-

“Ahhhhh!!” Fuck, that hurt. “FUCK!” He squirmed painfully on his back where he’d landed on a bunch of wooden planks that had been thrown between the two buildings like a bridge or the beginnings of a semi-legal construction site.

A worried and out of breath “Bucky?” crackled in his earpiece.

Bucky stood up with difficulty on the planks, checked his mask — still good — his goggles — still in place — holster and weapon — still intact, thank god for small mercies. “M’okay!” He walked as fast as he could to the nearest window, which was already open, thanks to the semi-legal suspended bridge. “In pursuit!” Oh shit, he must be riding on a shipload of adrenaline right now.

He stooped and slid inside the building.

He needed to find access to the roof, and fast. He took in his surroundings quickly. A tired couch and a man and a child huddled on it watching him with wide eyes. Two doorways into what looked like a physician’s office and an exam room. He ran into the doctor’s office; in his earpiece, he could hear Steve breathing heavily and yelling at people to get out of his way.

The doctor was gathering some papers together. He levelled an irate glare at Bucky, who ignored him and ran to the window, opened it, and found what he had been looking for. In front of him: the adjacent wall was so close he could touch it, no windows, and a metal ladder riveted onto the lunarcrete wall. He started to climb up, his arms and legs burning.

On the other side of the communications link, things seemed to have quieted down, but he could hear Steve’s harsh breathing and muttered cursing. Then a sudden yell, “Odinson!” and the noises of a crowd.

Bucky launched himself onto the roof, running and jumping over pipework and ventilation grates. Laufeyson had managed to cover so much ground, and Bucky could see him running away, a silhouette in the clouds of steam coming from the buildings underneath, the scene bathed in the afternoon light of the station. They ran like this for several seconds, Bucky nearly tripping several times over ducts. As he vaulted over a brick wall, he saw Laufeyson slowing down and thought that this could be it. He started sprinting again, catching up to Laufeyson.

Ten metres.

Laufeyson was running along the edge of the building, now.

Five metres. Bucky yelled at Laufeyson to freeze.

Two metres away. Laufeyson stopped. He was close to the edge of the buildings that bordered the gigantic bank of windows some forty metres down.

Bucky screeched to a halt and took his deescalation stance. “Laufeyson.” Raised his hands.

Laufeyson turned around and looked at him, his green eyes piercing. At that tense moment, Bucky heard Steve’s voice: “Lost him, Buck. He ducked back into the crowd.”

“Laufeyson. I’m with the Violent Crime Unit. There’s nowhere for you to run, we’ll catch up to you today, or tomorrow. You can come wilfully, or I can arrest you. Your choice,” Bucky said, out of breath. He emphasized his words by reaching for his handcuffs.

In front of him, Laufeyson appeared to be taking a breather, too, and considering his options, as if he had any, standing between Bucky and one cliff drop away from a gruesome death.

He smiled, and he, too, showed his hands, palms towards Bucky.

Like a surrender.

He took a step backwards.

“No!” Bucky threw himself forward, trying to grab the man, but Laufeyson stepped out of reach and…

Vanished from view.

Bucky stumbled to the ledge, and looked down. There was nobody.

No body.

Did he fucking jump?

“Holy shit.”

“Bucky, you okay?” came Steve’s worried voice.

Bucky took a moment to gather his wits and answered, “Yeah. Laufeyson… Lost him.” He laid on the floor to inspect the ledge, the stretch of wall like a precipice down into space. Vertigo sped his breathing up, but finally the back pain from his fall overcame his adrenaline levels, so he turned onto his back and looked up into the axis and the vague shapes of the city above him. His back was on fire, his legs felt like they would detach from his body at any moment. Fuck.

“Steve, I…”

“Bucky, where are you? I’m coming to you now.”

Bucky frowned and then patted himself until he found his phone. “Tune into my phone, I sent a ping of my location.”

Bucky caught his breath like that and endured the adrenaline crash, lying on a dusty rooftop with a gentle breeze on his face and more questions than his brain could handle in his head. What the fuck had happened?

Laufeyson had… jumped? Sidestepped and disappeared? He’d definitely disappeared, of that, Bucky was sure. When he had taken his second step towards the edge of the building, Bucky had seen his skin turn distinctly ashen, grey. His goggles had registered anomalous readings, and then nothing. Neon eyes and grey hands and then nothing but thin air. Bucky turned over again and crawled to the edge of the building.

“You okay, Bucky?” Steve’s footsteps crunched nearby, and he looked back to see Steve’s concerned face appear above a row of exhaust pipes.

“I really don’t know, Steve. It looked like the guy jumped off the building, but he…” Bucky sat up and waved his hand around. “Dissolved into thin air.” He pointed at the ledge. “Look.”

Steve tilted his head questioningly and crouched where Bucky pointed. “There’s no one down there. Straight drop.” Bucky nodded. “How?” He grabbed Bucky’s hand and pulled him up.

“Not a damn clue.” Bucky winced in pain, which didn’t escape Steve’s attention.

“You hurt?”

“Just a bad fall.” He dusted himself down a bit and sighed. “And you, how did it go?”

Steve shook his head but pulled his phone out and beckoned Bucky over to his side.

There, on the screen, the burly man stared back, features still unrecognizable, but resolve was clear in the stiff set of his shoulders. Steve had managed to capture him as he had turned around. Patches seemed to have been added to his outfit to conceal certain things. Like epaulettes. They looked at his reflective goggles, frozen in time on the phone screen.

“So he really was SAF. Odinson, perhaps?”

Steve nodded. “Matches the description of his ID. And he’s the most likely to know Laufeyson’s whereabouts.”

Bucky zoomed in on the picture. “But… he didn’t fill in any CWU for Laufeyson, right?”

Steve shook his head and pocketed his phone.

“Laufeyson found a way to contact him on the down-low? They know each other, meet each other? Then why would Odinson send _us_ a meet-up time and place tonight?”

Steve grumbled, “Nothing makes sense in this case. Who the fuck killed that woman, seriously? There are too many possible culprits, and people look like they just don’t fucking care! I hate this!” He kicked a pebble, sending it flying off the building.

Frustration was getting to them both, Bucky knew it. Neither of them reacted well to going in circles and being jerked around. “Okay, stop. Let’s take a deep breath.”

Steve rolled his eyes but did inhale and exhale once.

“All right, we’re gonna go back to the Bullpen, ask forensics to come here, see if they find anything of note, wait a bit back there, plan tonight’s escapade in Liminal Space, and then we’ll have Sunday to ourselves to like… think about something else. And then on Monday, we’ll start all over with a fresh eye. Maybe there’s something we missed at the second scene. Maybe we’ll be able to shake some more information from the scientists. Maybe Laufeyson or Odinson will come forward, have a change of heart.”

Steve heaved a big sigh. “Yeah, okay.”

Bucky smiled.

Steve smiled back. “Would an anko dango make you feel better?”

“Oh god, yes, please.”

* * *

The gangways between the outer shielding of the station and the inner shell supporting the structure of the O’Neill cylinder felt like the liminal space between the colony’s security and the unknown dangers of space, hence the name. Bucky could hear himself breathing in the vacuum suit and helmet that they had donned in case of… well, nobody inhabiting space really wanted to contemplate hull breaches, but everybody knew the risk and safeguarded against it.

Liminal Space was dark. It was vast. It was both too colossal to take in, and an interval too narrow between the habitat and the cold infinity of space. Bucky hated this place, he hated Liminal Space, hated walking around so close to the colony’s hull. Sound travelled all along the thirty-two-kilometre-long shielding, dampened but not stopped by eight metal partitions twelve centimetres thick. Steve was up front, walking down the deck suspended three meters above the hull, shining his torch all around him. The light briefly shone on titanium plating and the thin film coatings that reflected the light in a distorted rainbow, and on a spiderweb of stairs, catwalks and scaffolding. Screws thicker than Bucky’s arm held almost everything together; he might have been a spacer, born and raised, but he shivered, nonetheless.

Steve, though. Steve just walked confidently and had visibly fewer than zero shits to give about their proximity to the endless void and emptiness. Even after four days of failing at this case, Steve had regained his enthusiasm. He just would never let slide that someone, even as potentially shady as Martina Ahmed, could have been murdered out there.

The huge echo chamber, vibrating with the low sounds of machinery, made Bucky introspective. Or maybe it was the late hour. Or the million hurdles thrown in their way. This case was so bizarre and chaotic. Too many suspects or not enough. Bucky liked clean-cut cases. In fact, the only messy thing he tolerated in his life was Steve, really, and he had his hands full with Steve.

He heard Steve whistling through their comms. What a dork.

He let his own torchlight wander over the signs indicating what deck they were on, and wondered mindlessly if he would ever get the guts to open that Pandora’s box. He’d need to at some point, right? If Sam could see through him, how much time before Steve figured it out? After this case was over, he would.

‘Cause they lived with each other, ate together. They had grown up together, studied in the same school, passed the same exams in the same academy. They worked together, for fuck’s sake. How many more ways could their lives be entwined? He needed to tell Steve. Yeah.

It all boiled down to how much time he had left before Steve figured it out. It would be best if Bucky told him first.

Told him before the jig was up and Steve found out that his best friend had fallen in lust. In love.

Steve stooped low to examine something on the gangway railing, but Bucky couldn’t care less in that instant. He was a million light years away, or more accurately, he was some four kilometres away, in their living room, yesterday, looking at Steve; he was in their office, time and again eating something sweet that Steve had bribed him with; he was seven years ago, marching in a docker’s rights demonstration and looking over at his friend’s blonde head and noticing Steve looking right at him, with a sunny smile and…

Damn.

“… Steve…” He spoke too low for the mic to catch.

“Hey Buck, look at this.” Steve raised his hand, holding up a fleck of paint caught in his needle-nose tweezers. “Looks like a fluorescent marking on the railing.”

Bucky shook his head. After the case. He’d tell Steve everything, after the case. But right now, they needed to get this over with. “Let me.”

They looked at the weird little piece of paint at the end of the tweezers. “Phosphorescent paint?”

Steve eyerolled like a champion. “Phosphofluo something or other.”

“You’re just asking for a new lecture from Dernier.“ Bucky chuckled awkwardly, feeling his anxiety levels rising so close to space, and fidgeted a bit, bouncing his flashlight in his hand and shining it around, looking for markings, because even giving shit to Steve wasn’t enough to distract him. “You think this is maintenance?”

“I don’t think so, they usually use Brady labels for this.” Steve slipped the piece of paint into a sealed container. Bucky’s beam of light finally caught on a sign nailed to a girder higher up above their heads. “Hey, look. Access 12a. Must be close.”

Steve squinted. “I don’t… Are you sure?”

“Well, since I learned to read pretty early on, I can assure you th—”

“Oh, okay, thanks wiseguy.” Steve looked around for stairs accessing the general direction that Bucky had pointed in. “Hope you’ll find some time to teach me to read, then.”

Bucky hummed as they climbed to a higher platform, closer to the hull and its series of spacewalk hatches. He let Steve catch up to him and then swiped his finger over Steve’s helmet, making a show of examining it. “I can’t tell if that was salt or whine? We should turn this over to the lab for testing…”

Steve’s answering laugh was interrupted by a sudden clanking sound.

They both turned on their heels, trying to locate the noise in the cavernous space. The crisscrossing I-beams and stairs echoed with faraway steps and a sudden mechanical whirr, there and gone in an instant. They shared a look and shut their flashlights off.

Bucky signalled for Steve to keep to the front. They walked cautiously, making no sound in the darkness. All around them, Bucky could hear the dull groaning of the hull, a sound so deep you could feel it in your bones rather than your ears. There was still some light from the phosphorescent markings on the inner shielding above their heads and from the emergency hatches and the nearby spacewalk airlock. Those were lit up brightly, and the shafts of white light barred the gangways with beams of gleaming dust motes. It offered the perfect cover as they hid in the shadow of a stack of crates, watching.

Two people in spacesuits were currently rummaging through a metallic pallet box. A heavy-duty torque wrench had been parked right beside them, shining its worksite LED lamp into the crate.

Steve turned towards Bucky. “Do we have that hijacking protocol on our suits?”

Bucky shrugged and shook out his tablet from the satchel he’d brought with him. Steve stayed on the lookout as he typed away, trying to catch the radio frequency of those two guys' suits. In the corner of the screen, he could see the radiation level counter climbing with the incoming solar flare.

“Wait.”

Bucky drew his eyes off the tablet. Steve had stopped looking at the guys rummaging through the pallet box and was now otherwise occupied with the crate they were hiding behind. “Steve? What?” Bucky checked the two suits they were spying on. The lankier of the two had sidestepped into the electric light, which shone distinctly on one of those bright blue and deep black SAF badges. What rank, Bucky couldn’t see, but that patch colour just wasn’t used by any other corps. “What the fuck?” Bucky elbowed Steve. “Steve.”

He looked over, but Steve had very discreetly popped open the latches of the crate they were hiding behind and was examining it closely. Bucky looked back at the SAF guys, trying to keep an eye on them while reigning in his best friend’s ill-timed snooping, which was very similar to herding Alpine, damnit.

“Steve, the fuck are you doing?” Bucky hissed, as if the two clowns by the other crate could hear them.

“Bucky I think this is—”

Bucky saw the silhouette before the SAF bozos, but it was already too late. There was a shot, then the clank of the crate lid being slammed down. Bucky drew his weapon out of its holster, glad they had thought ahead and came prepared for SAF presence, and quickly ran towards the other side of the gangway, still mostly hidden by the contrast between the darkness and the hatchway light.

“Did you see the assailant?”

“No.” Steve had his taser at the ready and was looking right ahead, into the shaft of light from the next hatch.

Both SAF soldiers were looking around, now. Had that been a warning shot?

Bucky dispelled anxious thoughts of holes punched through the colony hull and focused on his surroundings.

The general low hum of machinery whirring in the distance and the sound of the hull creaking and groaning from thermal stress was permeating the air; all around him there were only static shadows and stacks of crates. There was no one else that he could see, but Bucky felt watched. The lanky soldier brought what could be an external comm unit to his face. Or a scanner.

“If that’s a scanner, we’re toast.”

“We should intervene.”

“Steve, there’s an unknown assail—”

Another shot rang out. “Checking our six,” Bucky called. And this time, the soldiers retaliated with several shots in opposite directions, then tried to retreat by taking the left gangway at a run. Bucky followed them with his eyes, hoping like hell that his camera would catch something in the low lighting, and trying to memorize the path they were taking if the camera failed to do so. Even though Liminal Space was confusing as fuck, this could give them a clue as to where they were going and from whence they came.

“Bucky…”

Bucky squinted into the dark, trying to see if anyone else seemed to be running.

“Bucky I think there’s someone—”

Steps behind him.

Bucky whirled around just in time to see a dark silhouette drawn into the column of light just ahead. Female or male, tallish, bulky in a vacuum suit and with something on their back, their face indiscernible in the darkness that surrounded them. They had placed themselves in exactly the right position so as not to be recognized.

Steve raised his clunky weapon at the same time that Bucky did.

“VCU! Identify yourself!” yelled Steve at the shape.

Bucky had a bad feeling about this. The shape balanced itself on its feet…

And bolted.

“Fuck.” Bucky heard Steve swear in his earpiece and saw him take off after the runner.

Bucky followed suit, sprinting like crazy to catch up. He could hear Steve yell at the runner to stop right where they were.

They were only a hundred metres from their target, nearly at the next spacewalk hatch, when all hell broke loose.

Maybe he could blame the noise of his own breathing, rendered thunderous because of the sprint, or maybe he never would have heard it until it was too late. Suit helmets had a nice field of vision, but they weren’t made for record-breaking speed runs. Bucky could have blamed it on a lot of stuff, but the end result was the same.

Just as Steve passed through the light from the hatch, he stopped at the edge of the column, and turned his head to the side. The last thing Bucky thought was, _fucking damnit, those soldiers are so fucking crazy to be shooting in Liminal Space, the hull is too close_ , and then he got bowled over from the left.

His breath left his lungs in a woosh as he crashed onto the metal latticework of the footbridge. His helmet got smashed on the metal by something strong hitting him in the back of the head. The protective glass cracked. Someone yelped — Steve? — and everything went hazy… Shit, what was it with this day and him doing his damnedest to break his own skull?

Head…

Hurt…

In the ruckus all around, he could only hear heavy machinery screeching and those terrifying metallic groans reverberating through his achy skull. His weapon was… somewhere? He managed to get a grip on the grating of the bridge, and he croaked out a shaky, “Steve?”

What was it about vision being the first to go, last to come back? He finally managed to focus on what was around him as his hearing came and went. He was laying on the side footbridge instead of the main gangway; everything was so dark, his vision narrowed down to what was in front of him, everything so very dark, so dark but some lights… blue, blue lights.

He blinked. On the secondary gangway underneath him, someone was standing there? Blue lights watching him in the web of I-beams. He blinked, confused.

“Bucky… Come on, Buck, wake up…” Steve’s voice sounded shaky.

“Steve?” Bucky managed to lever himself up from the floor. He looked around. “Steve?!”

“The hatch, Buck.” Steve’s voice sounded defeated. Bucky looked around again, still kind of disoriented by the limited lighting. He looked back down, but there was nobody, only the greenish-blue fluorescent strips of warning signs.

He pushed himself up, fighting a wave of nausea, and saw, not two metres away, what had been used to knock him down. A spanner the size of his whole arm. Holy shit. He got his bearings back and stumbled towards the gangway, crashing to his knees right beside the hatch.

The closed hatch.

With Steve on the other side.

“Son of a bitch! Steve?” Bucky put his hand on the clear glass of the door, looking at Steve sitting on the hatch floor.

“I saw someone come at me, couldn’t make them out. The airlock was open, they kicked me inside, and I heard you, you were down. They shut me in here and got out through the open hatch.” Steve closed his eyes, visibly trying to find his composure. When he opened his eyes, they bored directly into Bucky’s soul. ”It’s been tampered with. It’s not gonna open again, Bucky. They broke the emergency lever. I checked, the countdown has been set and I have no way out. I’m stuck.”

Bucky looked around frantically. “Stuck… stuck…” Bucky shook his head, and a piece of his helmet glass jiggled off and fell between the metal lattice of the gangway. “No. I’ll get you out. I’m gonna get you out.” He tried to stand up, but Steve struck the glass door with his open palm.

“You don’t understand, Buck! I’m. I’m stuck!” He took a breath as Bucky let himself slide down the glass, sitting so close, so close. “I’m not getting out.” He looked down. “Shit. Holy shit.”

Bucky looked at Steve’s side, down to where Steve had glanced, and saw his sample holder, which seemed to have exploded on impact or taken the brunt of the blows.

“Steve. Fuck. Steve…” Bucky’s voice shook. “Where…?”

“In the crate.” Steve’s voice sounded so far away.

On his hip, dusting his suit, a blackish powder was gnawing, melting the fabric of the suit.

The silence stretched between them, spreading out over the clear glass like an oil spill. Another metallic groan sounded around them when the slightly robotic voice of the station filtered through Steve’s comm unit.

“SIXTY SECONDS UNTIL DECOMPRESSION.”

“Steve.” Bucky felt himself hyperventilating. “Holy shit, Steve.” He brought his still-shaky hand up against the glass.

“Bucky.” Steve raised his own hand to where Bucky had put his. “Don’t go.”

“Shouldn’t I be the one to say that?” He choked; his throat constricted. “Why you gotta be the one leaving me?”

Steve inclined his head until it met the glass. He was so close, so close.

“Bucky, you need to know something.”

Bucky shook his head and put his other hand on the glass door. “No, please don’t.” Whatever Steve wanted to say, it had to—

Steve looked at him angrily. “Come on, Buck I’m trying to confess here.”

No, no, no, no. “But it’ll mean you’re going. You’re not. You’re here.” He said, pleading to whoever was listening.

The silence stretched. Bucky’s head was getting clearer very slowly, but his skull still beat on the same staccato as his heart.

“I…”

“Wait, I know a way!”

Steve reared back. “What?”

“The torque!” Bucky got up quickly, not even paying attention to his head injury or the nausea that went with it.

“Bucky…”

Bucky sprinted towards the machine, or tried to. It wasn’t that far! This could work. He stumbled several times on his way. Those things were so fucking heavy duty. If it could break a titanium alloy screw the size of his head, it could break the door, right? It was only glass. Just a few metres to cover, no problem.

“THIRTY SECONDS UNTIL DECOMPRESSION.”

Then he’d worry about the wipeout. ESD liquid, that’s what Drenkov said. Okay, okay, okay.

“Bucky!” Steve’s voice sounded indignant over the comm.

“Coming!” Bucky got inside the machine and pawed at the controls. “Come on, you piece of shit, start up.” The machine stayed silent.

“Bucky, you bastard! Listen to me!” Bucky didn’t stop poking the command panel until the machine began whirring. “Asshole, if you break this door you’re gonna space us both!”

Bucky’s heart was pounding like crazy, it was in his throat, in his trembling hands, in the bump he could feel bleeding sluggishly at the back of his head. Suddenly, punching a hole in the hull didn’t seem so bad. “Better space us both than let you die in there, Stevie,” he growled and managed to turn the rumbling little machine around. The thing wasn’t fast enough.

“Bucky, no.”

Bucky grit his teeth. “Bucky, yes.” He swung around towards the glass door and put the machinery at the highest speed it could reach.

“FIFTEEN SECONDS UNTIL DECOMPRESSION.”

Bucky jumped out, Steve got as far away from the glass door as possible. In an enormous blow of the hydraulic arm, the motorized torque wrench crashed against the door.

This couldn’t not work.

When Bucky opened his eyes again, he felt his world going grey. His world going silent. His breath caught in his throat.

Steve reached for the glass again.

Bucky couldn’t breathe. Maybe he’d never breathe again.

Some fractures had appeared in the glass, a hole had been punched around the hydraulic arm, and the torque wrench had shut down and was laying on the gangway, dangling by its arm.

The reinforced door still stood strong.

He screamed incoherently.

“TEN SECONDS UNTIL DECOMPRESSION.”

“Bucky. Please.” Bucky stood up at the hatch. He could only hear his ragged breathing. And Steve’s.

“Steve, I don’t want you to go.”

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“FIVE SECONDS UNTIL DECOMPRESSION.”

Bucky shook his head. “I love you.” He would have told Steve at the end of the case. They had time!

“FOUR.”

“I love you.” They had had time.

“THREE.”

“I’m gonna get the fuckers who did this to you.”

“TWO.”

“It’s gonna be cold without you.”

“ONE.”

Behind Steve, the four pairs of latches that allowed the ventilation of the hatch opened, emitting a horrid sucking sound. That was air. That was Steve’s air.

“Please, no.”

Steve piercing blue eyes bored into his. “This is the end of the line, Bucky.”

The sucking sound stopped progressively after several seconds. There was no sound anymore from Steve’s side, apart from his shaky breaths.

Steve reached to the side, trying to hold onto something, anything. He didn’t have magnetic boots. He had no tether line prepared. Neither of them did. Because they weren’t supposed to…

The spacewalk door opened into the pitch black of space.

The empty mattress of the universe, dotted with stars, stared into Bucky’s heart. In how many more ways could their lives be entwined? Everything was unravelling. He heard the station’s hull breach alarms blaring in a distant and disinterested way. Who cared about a hull breach when…

“Bucky, I’ll always be beside you.” Bucky saw how Steve strained to maintain his grip as the centrifugal forces of the station’s spin couldn’t hold him onto the floor any more.

Who cared about anything?

“Stevie.”

A new metallic rumble echoed through the station, maybe it was the mirror shields closing because of the incoming solar flare. The colony, ruthlessly living, moving. Whatever it was, it shook Steve’s grip, and his hand slipped from the handle.

He stayed suspended there with no hold on anything. With nothing to grab onto, it was only a matter of seconds until he got pushed out the airlock.

Pushed out into space.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be the only place in that fic where Steve and Bucky are shown to have weapons.
> 
> I dithered for a long time on this. At first I took the very cinematic route and had them have guns, and "taking stances" and "drawing their guns" like this is Hawaii five-O or whatever. Heroic and cliché.
> 
> But then I realised how the ubiquitousness of weapons in movies is reflective of our belief as a society that the only answer to any conflict is "one upping" each other with a bigger show of violence, and also is a symptom of the widespread "western" weapon culture bleeding over into pop culture (or at least I think so).
> 
> If I had to describe my stance on firearms, it would be similar to Vimes' in Terry Pratchett's Men At Arms.
> 
> So I encourage you to imagine that all weapons wielded by Steve and Bucky are low powered tasers, mostly used as defensive weapons and to stall someone, not incapacitate fully. Only "the bad guys" are using guns, which in my mind should all be illegal someday. Even though I believe that there is truth to the disuasive effect of "bigger weaponry", I could not, in my "imaginary world", see guns as legal, or worse: easily available.


	5. Elasticity and Plasticity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Bucky deals with the aftermath, in a not altogether good way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings in the chapter for breakdown, and depression and overall feelings of grief. Do not deal with your grief or your depression in unhealthy ways, seek help and seek the closest "trusted person".

### Part II, Chapter 5: Elasticity and Plasticity

In physics and materials science, elasticity is the ability of a body to resist a distorting influence and to return to its original size and shape when that influence or force is removed. Solid objects will deform when adequate loads are applied to them; if the material is elastic, the object will return to its initial shape and size after removal. This is in contrast to plasticity, in which the object fails to do so and instead remains in its deformed state.

`― Wikipedia, “Elasticity”`

In physics and materials science, plasticity, also known as plastic deformation, is the ability of a solid material to undergo permanent deformation, a non-reversible change of shape in response to applied forces. For example, a solid piece of metal being bent or pounded into a new shape displays plasticity as permanent changes occur within the material itself. In engineering, the transition from elastic behavior to plastic behavior is known as yielding.

`― Wikipedia, “Plasticity”`

As humankind reached farther into space, unique and novel problems arose pertaining to healthcare. […] In this paper, we aim to demonstrate how early intake of patients, advertisement of ubiquitous state-sponsored prevention, and a low caseload for medical workers has helped space colonists retain a somewhat high life expectancy. Data has been corrected to account for life-endangering situations and mental stressors encountered daily. […]

_ Census and social work _

Social workers are divided into several groups, each specialising in a certain field: mourning, stress, trauma, and overflow. The census, mandatory on all space stations, helps the detection of unforeseen cases, isolated people, or undetected breakdowns and traumas. […]

Overflow takes any case unrelated to the main three categories, cases from workers reaching their case limit, or severe or complex cases where the group in the pertinent category needs additional assistance.

_ Disorder prevalence _

[…] Vacuum fever is considered a phenomenon endemic to space settlements [Vishnaraman, 2072]. The prevalence of vacuum phobia, astrophobia, claustrophobia and agoraphobia is twice Earth average (Eavg). […] The prevalence of PTSD is especially low in space settlements comparative to Earth; however, table 3 shows that this can be ascribed to the immediate intake of traumatised patients, the intense primary care given, and the gradual and conditional decrease in support[…].

It is generally considered very hard to slip through the cracks of the Space mental health care system [Soufiane et al. 2090].

`― H. Szaba, E. Kaltenboch, “Comparative study of psychological care in space colonies“`

Those fucking blue lights. Barnes. Hello… So blue…

Hello

Barnes?

“Hello, Mister Barnes.”

“Hello, Mister Barnes.”

“…”

“Hello, Mister Barnes, how are you feeling today?”

“…”

Hello…  
Hello, Mister

Barnes

“Hello, Mister Barnes. How are you feeling today?”  
“…”

“Hello, Mister Barnes. How are you feeling today?”  
“… Blue lights…”

“Hello, Mister Barnes. How are you feeling today?”

“… Steve?”

“No, Mister Barnes, Steve is dead.”

“What?”

* * *

“Hello, Mister Barnes. How are you feeling today?”

“… I don’t know.”

“Can you try to hold my hand?”

“Don’t! Steve?”

* * *

“Hello, Mister Barnes. How are you feeling today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you try to hold my hand?”

He stared at her hand, uncomprehending. Her eyes were blue lights.

* * *

They opened the door, they smiled. They said it was time. He walked. A door. They opened the door. He sat.

“Hello, Mister Barnes. How are you feeling today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you try to hold my hand?”

She slid a hand halfway across the table. He put a hand on the table. He looked.

“I…”

“Is my hand too far?”

He looked.

“Yes.”

She slid her hand all the way to his side of the table.

“Can you try to grasp my hand?”

He looked. He grabbed her hand. It felt weird. He felt drained. All that energy for this simple gesture.

“Do you feel my hand?”

“Maybe…”

She nodded. He looked at the hands so much. His hand, on the other side of the glass door.

“Can you look me in the eye, Mister Barnes?”

He tried. He tried to look anywhere but the hands and the glass door and the…

“No.”

He breathed. Maybe? She said something. Did he exist? The door opened. Sucking everything into space. He screamed.

* * *

“Hello, Mister Barnes. How are you feeling today?”

“I… don’t really know.”

She smiled and slid her hand to the middle of the small, round table.

“Can you try to hold my hand?”

He did.

“Do you feel my hand?”

“Yes.”

“Can you close your eyes?”

He closed his eyes.

“My hand is a tether, if you ever feel lost during this exercise, grasp it and pull, like an anchor, and open your eyes. I’ll pull you back.”

He opened his eyes.

She tilted her head, still smiling. She looked so sure. Bucky closed his eyes again.

“Focus on your breathing.” Her voice was the only thing in the universe. He just didn’t have all his senses right now, like his body had disconnected.

“Now, focus on my voice. Can you hear me, Mister Barnes?”

“Yes.”

“Listen to my voice, then, and its timbre. I am now going to breathe in and out, listen and match your breathing to mine.”

She started to breathe audibly, and the simple fact of focusing on something exterior to himself, on another human being, moved something, he didn’t know what, in the cottony haze of his mind.

“Now,” — she was talking so slow and low — “listen to your mind, look at the images in your mind. Let yourself feel, for some time. You are breathing, slowly. Look at what’s in your mind’s eye, and feel it without dampening anything.” She whispered, “And remember, if it becomes too intense, grasp my hand. Pull. I am your safety line in the storm.”

He listened, he breathed. He felt like the last days didn’t even exist. He’d lived under a lid, holding a rock, an incredibly heavy boulder, in a glass cage with no air and no light. How many days? He was at sea, a cork on the stormy ocean with no shore in sight. Waters dark, skies grey, no horizons.

He just wanted to go back. But there was only that despair, gnawing at his marrow like a worm.

He just wanted Steve back, he wanted only that. He grabbed the line.

The doctor pulled him back to himself with astonishing strength, and he opened his eyes in shock. She smiled at him and gave him a handkerchief.

“What…”

“Breathe, Mister Barnes, match your breathing to mine.” He did. “And blow your nose.” He wiped his nose then wiped the rivulets of tears that he felt suddenly on his skin.

“How do you feel now?”

“Drained.” He wiped away a new wave of fresh tears. “Like shit.”

She squeezed his hand lightly before releasing it. “But now, at least, you feel.”

* * *

“So, you are going to be released tomorrow. How do you feel?”

James looked out the window. “I’m okay.”

“James?” He looked at his psychologist. “Please define okay.”

He bit his lip. He needed to think about it. “Hopeful. Fearful.”

She nodded; he must have answered correctly, then. There was no correct answer, he knew, but still, all her satisfied nods felt like a small victory.

“Since you are going to be released tomorrow, I think we should go over your forthcoming therapy. I also need to ask if you are in agreement with your release?” 

_No._ “Yes.” _I want to sleep forever._ “I’d like to go home.” 

“Are you looking forward to anything outside of this hospital?”

 _I want to hunt down the fuckers who did this to Steve._ “I’d like to see my cat and my sister.”

Again a nod, this time with a sunny smile. “Great. Then let me go over this.” She pushed a tablet towards him. For a very brief moment he stayed blinking at the screen, at the icon in the corner showing that the solar flare would be upon them soon. He blinked again and there was only the Medical Admin logo.

James. Bucky. Looked up. “What do I need to know?”

“We had to take care of you for ten days, and yesterday’s discussion and evaluation show that you should be able to move on with the standard process.”

“Standard?”

“Loss of a close coworker.” She tapped the tablet. “It’s just a more… heavy duty version of the loss-of-acquaintance process.”

Acquaintance? Who did they think Steve was?

“I know he was your best friend, but the only heavier-duty process available would be life partner loss,” she said, apologetic.

Bucky frowned, but ultimately tamped down on his desire to rage against… this administrative machine. He hadn’t told them. Because the words they’d said to each other he’d keep till they ferried his cold body to the Memorial Trees. “So, what happens?” No sense in desacralising this last moment they’d shared.

“What happens is that you are going to be released to your next of kin, Rebecca Barnes, for a week, and then you will move back into your home. A case worker has been assigned to you. Dr. Claire Temple. She will take charge of all the follow-up appointments. You should be expecting about two more weeks of appointments and check-ups.”

“When will I be back at work?”

She raised a politely surprised eyebrow. “Are you sure you want to go back into the force?”

Shit, that hadn’t been the right question, right. “Of course.” _Shit, shit._ “We detectives are a close-knit group, wouldn’t it help to be near them?”

She pursed her lips. “I have no opinion on that, James,” _Oh yeah, you do_. “I think you should bring up the subject with Dr. Temple, who will evaluate the whens and hows of your return to work. Any return will, nonetheless, not happen until the mandatory three weeks of rest and intensive care are up.”

“Of course.”

“Are you okay with all this?” James acquiesced dutifully. “All right! Sign here, then.”

He signed his release.

Three fucking weeks.

* * *

He hadn’t looked at the date this morning just so he wouldn’t have to calculate how many days had passed since. Steve. Of course, he knew how much time had passed; there was a new calendar inside him, 2165 AD, Standard Earth Day number thirty-fucking-seven since Steve’s death.

If asked, he would credit Alpine for his success in all of his psych evals. Dr. Temple was no fool, and she knew something was amiss. Becca hadn’t stopped badgering him ever since he had moved back home. Fucking Sam Wilson was hanging around checking up on him, too. It felt like he didn’t have one single second to himself, hadn’t been left the fuck alone for five minutes since getting out of the meltdown ward. But no matter. The good Dr Temple didn’t relent in her visits, but she still had had to admit that he was… clearable. She had stalled his return by a week, but he’d managed all of his interviews for that week perfectly.

Bucky woke up on Monday feeling just as numb as usual. Alpine pawed at his chin. He got up and quite simply went through the motions of getting ready for work. The silence and absence of Steve was like a sore in his mouth, a scab. He hit a snag when he got out of the shower — the same snag he’d been hitting for days, really — when he figured he needed to eat breakfast. Breakfast was Steve’s domain. He’d given some of the lungs and giblets he’d gotten from the butcher to Alpine, then he had dithered in the kitchen, at a loss for what he should eat. Toast. Milk. Chocolate.

He wasn’t even really hungry, anyway.

The walk to the Bullpen was as short as ever; they lived pretty close to their place of work. It was even shorter today because Steve wasn’t there, and he didn’t have a reason to linger, talk to someone. Once on the elevator, he watched the colony through the windows, contemplating the curved streets, the sparse trees lining the bank of windows into space.

Bucky turned around. He didn’t want to watch the stars or see the moon. There were a lot of things these days that he didn’t want to see. To do. To feel.

He reached their floor, his floor. The doors to the elevator whooshed open and he stared, horrified, into the depths of dead space. One blink of his eyes later, and his heart started again as he looked into the succession of corridors and open-plan offices.

Fuck.

Bucky took a wobbly step forward. It wasn’t the first time since Steve’s death that he’d had some sort of weird moment like that. He wasn’t stupid, he knew that was what PTSD did to you. Claire had told him, and they’d put it on The List.

The list of all the fucked-up things he was going through.

 _It’s a process_ , she’d said.

Like the close co-worker loss process. The mourning process. The return to daily life process.

He was getting tired of all the processes.

* * *

Day ten of his return to work dawned and Bucky was already fed up with everything. He had asked Phillips to take the kid gloves off yesterday, and had only received a glower and a sharp, “Go back to your station, Barnes.” He felt caged in, and he was being handled like a live grenade. He just wanted to fucking _do_ something. Steve’s death case had been sent to fucking Vice for reasons unknown, and Bucky had been temporarily assigned as support for a Fraud case.

Claire had tried very hard to make him see how his sense of self-worth shouldn’t be tied to the types of cases he got assigned to, and that had been a very good smokescreen to hide how fucking miserable he felt about not being able to do anything for Steve.

Breathing through his annoyance, Bucky stalked across the office and fell into his chair, not bothering with much more than a grunt to answer Dugan’s greeting. He counted inside his head up to ten, then backwards to one. The desk was overly messy. It had stayed undisturbed all through his convalescence, and ever since his return to work, Bucky hadn’t bothered cleaning up his workspace.

Phillips had asked him to come to his office in an hour, so perhaps he could kill time with this task. He ran a finger along the edge of the desk and it came up dusty. Yep.

He made piles and opened all the drawers — only his drawers though, leaving Steve’s undisturbed; he wasn’t opening that particular can of worms today — and made other piles. He binned a whole stack of useless papers, then his eyes fell on that note he’d seen, what seemed a lifetime ago: Steve’s scribbles with Lukin’s name.

Bucky sat back in his chair and frowned. He looked down at the bin. Then back up at the piece of paper.

He didn’t know what Dugan and Jones were making of his digging through the paper bin, but he dug back out all the papers he’d just thrown away. Half an hour later saw Bucky restacking everything in a whole new system, Steve’s notes set apart from his own, and divided into a “looks innocuous / is unreadable” pile and a “fishy” pile. Most of the fishy pile contained doodles and annotated registries. Steve seemed to have been deeply entrenched in a trend analysis of homicide, theft and trafficking statistics, and he’d pulled up names, duration of investigations, detective units, scribbled maps, and abstruse diagrams linking stuff only a brain like Steve’s would be able to see an association between.

It was all mostly inconclusive stuff, albeit a thorough overlook showing that something was amiss in Vice.

Bucky closed his eyes and breathed in and out, slowly. This felt so pointless. Everything felt pretty pointless. He should have taken his meds. Whatever Steve’s hare-brained chase had been about, Bucky had no clue and wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know. Too many feelings to unpack here. Why hadn’t Steve talked to him about it? Was this whole thing just idle thoughts coalescing around his rocky relationship with Lukin? Should he delve into it as a means to get closure? Should he let sleeping dogs lie?

Shouldn’t he be focusing on how Steve had died, instead? What the fuck good was a pile of doodles going to do him if he never found who had sent Steve through the airlock?

Steve had found some wipeout before he’d… Did the crate containing it get retrieved by Lost and Found? If so, Bucky should be able to get his hands on it easily, since the Detective Administration never had really broken off from Lost and Found.

Those pricks in Liminal Space had been SAF, but they had been waylaid by someone else, or a group of someone elses. Why the hell had Odinson led them there? What the fuck had happened? There weren’t a lot of people who could have known where they were. SAF higher ups? Transhumanists interested in the tech, but then how would they have known? Via Laufeyson?

Blue lights and eyes staring at him.

His watch beeped with an alert and he opened his eyes with a gasp. Phillips. Damnit.

Bucky ran down several grey corridors and suffered through an elevator ride — no flashbacks this time, great — before finally arriving in front of Phillips’ office door. He breathed in and out before knocking.

“Come in, Barnes.”

Bucky opened the door, resolute, and went into the office with the most confident stride he could muster.

Phillips was currently eyeing a report on his desk suspiciously. Without looking up, he pointed to the chair in front of his desk. “Siddown, Barnes.”

“Commissioner.” Bucky sat, waiting for Philips to finally give him the time of day.

He finished reading, scoffed, and signed the document before finally levering the most unimpressed stare at Bucky.

“So. How are you feeling, son?”

There was a moment of silence as Bucky tried to process the question. Was he still being coddled? Was he being evaluated? Was this the Phillips equivalent of handling him? He’d come in here thinking he’d finally be briefed on what his next mission would entail, after his little bout of rebellion yesterday and ten days of staying in line, keeping his head down.

“Commissioner…” Bucky bit his lip nervously, brow furrowed. “I’m okay. More stressed out by the lack of anything to do than anything else. Anxious to pick up the work we…” He hesitated on the plural, but barrelled on, figuring that it would be more suspicious if he tried not to mention anything related to Steve. He had to look like someone who was dealing with his shit. “Uh, the work we had on our plates.” He shrugged. “I think it’ll get better with time and that I’ll get some closure when I know who got… who killed Steve. Rogers. Who killed Rogers.” Bucky gritted his teeth. He may have practised this, but he just couldn’t… he just.

Things. Every fucking thing. Steve was everywhere. _Was_ being the fucking key word.

Phillips frowned harder. Maybe it’d be more suitable at this point to say that he frowned the hardest. That man and his resting bitch face weren’t the most decipherable at the best of times, and ever since Liminal Space, Bucky’s ability to read people had been pretty much shot to shit. Phillips tipped himself back in his chair and rested his hands on his paunch.

“Listen, Barnes. You’re clever. You might be one of the best. If Rogers was still with us, I’d say you _were_ the best. But you’ve suffered a loss, and I know how it feels.” He leaned forward again, hands clasped and elbows on the desk, and stared straight into Bucky’s eyes. “You can’t bullshit me, because I used to try to bullshit my own commissioner in my own time, just like you’re doing right now. You’re gonna hate me, I know, but you have to listen to what I’m going to say, and listen close.” With one finger, he slid a tablet across the table towards Bucky. “Getting out the all clear on your eval was only the first step. Now you have to mourn, and mourning doesn’t stop when you think you have mourned enough. Mourning stops when you realize that grief never ends.”

Bucky made an abortive move towards the tablet, but didn’t take it. “What’s going on, sir?” he groused between his teeth. There was no mistaking that tone for a “You’re not going to like it” tone. “What’s this?”

“This,” Phillips tapped the tablet, “is the current state of Rogers’ case.”

Bucky didn’t register himself moving before he had the tablet in his grasp. He gawked at it, wondering how it had teleported into his hands.

“This won’t help you at first, for a variety of reasons. Moving heaven and earth for your late partner won’t bring him back, son, you have to know that.” Bucky gritted his teeth, angry for no reason other than he felt like Phillips was just preparing him for a let-down, a disappointment. “Getting riled up about the handling of his case won’t help you in the long run. Throwing you into complex cases just to replace the depression with busywork will only make you botch important cases.” Bucky swallowed with difficulty, listening, but at the same time entirely focused on the turned-off tablet that he held in his hands. “So first, you’re gonna take that and go back home. You’re gonna sit your ass down and fill in the official request form for a roommate or the request to change flats to a one-bedroom. Then… then you read that thing. You go punch a wall or scream into your Pillow of Anger or whatever, I don’t care, son. But you get your anger out, because I’m not taking off the damn kid gloves, son, I’m not. Tomorrow, you’ll be officially back on regular duty. I have extended your temporary support position at Frauds. No legwork, no witness reviews, no weapons or rooftop chases, nothing. You’re gonna use your brain. Practice your patience until you’ve grieved.”

Bucky still had his eyes fixed on the tablet, so the words only registered a moment later. “What?” He looked up at Phillips’ grave face. “You’re keeping me in Carter’s unit?” His breathing went suddenly ragged; was Phillips barring him from doing his job? “What about Ahmed’s murder?”

“I’m cold casing it. It’s been more than a month, you’ll have ample time to go back to it.”

“Are you f— are you serious?!”

“Have I ever joked around? Ever?”

“I am **fit** to do my **job** ,” Bucky growled.

“Are you really, son? Because right now you’re not showing me much proof.” Phillips pointed to the tablet. “Go home. Read that. Get your anger out. Come back tomorrow. You’re going to get angrier before you get better.” He made a shooing gesture as Bucky grabbed the device. “Now get your ass out of my office.”

Bucky slammed the door on his way out. It didn’t even feel that good.

* * *

Some small part of Bucky obeyed. The detective he had worked to become, the one who grew up being Steve’s cool-headed counterpart, the guy who had sworn to abide by the law, seek truth and find what had been lost, who had laboured under Phil Coulson, Aleksander Lukin and Chester Phillips, that guy gritted his teeth and went back home, the tablet burning a hole in his inner coat pocket.

The walls of their apartment all echoed with the reminders of Steve and Bucky’s life together, though. With midnight hugs, sugary breakfasts, dumb arguments, awkward silences, and the confession of a dead man.

Sitting there amidst the remnants of their lives, he spent several minutes contemplating what to do and coming up empty. He hadn’t even taken off his jacket or the insignia hung around his neck. There was a smidge of procrastination, putting off the moment of truth. As soon as he turned the tablet on, he knew there would be no more avoiding Steve’s death.

No more avoiding his powerlessness.

Bucky put the tablet down and took off his jacket, shoes, insignia. Alpine came to greet him, purring like a spacecraft engine, and gnawed on his trouser leg until he took the cat in his arms.

He padded through the living room into the bathroom, where he checked if water rations were high enough to take a shower. There had been major problems with the water system three days ago, and water supply had been redirected to address basic needs only. Alpine jumped from his arms down to the sink and meowed at his own reflection in the mirror. It looked like the building reservoir was replenished, and Bucky sighed in relief. A good water shower; one of those would be so much better than just a sonic shower.

All this bought him approximately fifteen minutes of avoidance.

Back in their neat living room, the tablet was still there, sitting parallel to the table’s edge.

What was it that Amira Ahmed had said?

_I don’t want to hear this._

Bucky cleaned the apartment. He rolled a ball of aluminium foil and watched Alpine paw the shit out of it. Then he tried to apply for a new roommate, as the station laws required, but got stuck at the beginning of the form, staring at the blinking cursor. He changed forms and applied for a change of flats, to a single.

Then he turned on the news, which was running reports about last semester’s building progress in the spaceport, and cooked something. Something easy, something in one pot. He made more than he should have, enough for two plates, so he fridged the leftovers. There might have been meat, or maybe not. He wasn’t really sure, and he didn’t really care.

He cleaned the kitchen.

He went to sleep.

* * *

A shock. Oh mama, what?

There’s static on the TV. “He’s waking up.” He needs to close the door.

I need to go somewhere. “Sedate him.” The voice was urgent. And what’s wrong with the TV? “This is delicate work; we can’t have him wake up.” It’s okay. I’ll turn it off.

Thanks.

* * *

Bucky gasped awake in the dead of the night. He raised his shaky hand, saw that it was three a.m., and dragged his hand down his face. It came back wet with sweat and tears. He couldn’t see much, but he could hear, in the obscurity, his own ragged breathing, like suffocation.

He sat up and slammed his hand on the light switch. Blessed light.

His door was ajar. Ever since their trip into Liminal Space, he couldn’t look at closed doors. All closed doors opened onto space. And maybe he didn’t want to admit it in the light of day, but here, alone, his cat eyeing him from the foot of the bed, after waking up from a nightmare of darkness so solid it felt like a physical presence looming over him in his bedroom, darkness so solid he hadn’t been able to breathe, he could admit that… Yeah. No doors.

Bucky padded softly into the living room and immediately dimmed the lights when they came on, bathing the room in a soft glow. He sat down heavily on the sofa and brushed a hand through his hair, the exhausted gesture of a man lacking sleep, purpose, and the constant presence that had lived unchangingly around him. He grabbed the tablet and didn’t think twice before turning it on, quite literally punching the icon that read “Report 651 – Steven Grant Rogers.”

> “Reporting: Detective Officer Brock Rumlow.
> 
> Status: Pending Commissioner Review.
> 
> Victim: Steven Grant Rogers, 28 years old.
> 
> Blue eyes; blond hair; height: 1.66m.
> 
> During a routine inspection in the scope of investigation 2165-348, Detective Officer Rogers (ID 54985870), accompanied by Detective Officer Barnes (ID 32557038) went to signage 12b of the third segment of Liminal Space. At this stage, security cameras captured the pair halting to review something that Rogers had found.
> 
> Something catches their attention, as seen at 11:52 p.m. sec. cam. AF55g. They are seen hiding and surveilling something or someone out of range of the next security cameras (list of cameras reviewed in attachment 4).
> 
> Barnes’ body camera, which was nearly indecipherable[1.1], catches shots being fired at around 11:54 p.m. Recorded machinery noise makes it difficult to distinguish the precise timing. Shots are exchanged while Rogers and Barnes stay under cover.
> 
> At 11:55 p.m., Barnes’ body-camera and microphone seem to confirm the fact that an assailant was seen by both men. Rogers is seen taking off after the unknown subject and taking a stand, shouting a warning, while Barnes is covering him. The offender that Rogers is warning is on camera too far out of range[1.2] for analysis and obscured by the contrast with the light coming from spacewalk hatch 14 on Rogers’ immediate right.
> 
> At 11:55 p.m. on sec. cam. AG57d, a second offender can be seen hidden on Barnes’ left, inside the hydraulic equipment storage area. At this timestamp we can see a simultaneous attack on Barnes and Rogers.
> 
> Barnes is hit over the head, splitting his helmet and rendering further footage from his body camera unusable[1.3].
> 
> Unsub 1 takes off and leaves the scene as Rogers, who was distracted by an unknown source on his left, turns towards the commotion behind him. We see that this distracts him from the spacewalk hatch opening at 11:56 p.m., as Barnes has already been taken down. A third subject, who could be Unsub 1 or 2 as they both disappeared off camera, appears to jump from the upper deck, as shown on sec. cam. AG56t. This subject is using a proximity thrust device of unknown design so as to gain sufficient velocity, which helps them kick Rogers into the hatch.
> 
> At 11:58 p.m., Barnes-“

His vision going grey at the edges was what prompted Bucky to turn off the reading tablet. He looked off into the middle distance and tried as hard as he could to breathe like Claire had told him to.

This should have been his investigation. Was he biased? Too close? Maybe. But Rumlow would fudge it, he was the laziest piece of shit ever.

Bucky turned the reader on again, and scrolled further down.

> “- and part of those sensors embedded in the spacesuit have been retrieved[3.4], showing elevated heart rate, irregular breathing patterns (note: see coroner expertise, stress) and decreasing pressure, which could be indicative of a perforation of the vacuum suit.
> 
> Solar flare Hughes scale X1.2 hit the Lagrange four colony at 00:08 a.m. All retrievable data from Rogers’ vacuum suit cut off from-“

Bucky’s breath sped up and he scrolled even further.

> “The crate behind which Officers Rogers and Barnes hid was inspected and was found packed with anti-ESD foil, wiring and phosphorescent paint. A space left empty between the contents of the crate could be indicative of an object having been retrieved. We found no trace of it (see attachment for size). No leads were found indicating what this could have been or if the contents of the crate had been arranged in this way originally.”

Bucky scrolled down to the appendices. The file contained pictures of evidence, lists of camera recordings, data and annexes everywhere. It gave all the appearance of exhaustiveness, but it was a fucking mess that made Bucky’s blood boil.

He scrolled back up and fell on the end of the report.

> “All evidence points to a smuggling operation gone wrong. The technological savviness necessary to highjack a spacewalk hatch and the access to personal thrusters point to the transhumanist movement named Kobik.”

He was having tunnel vision again.

So that’s how it was going to be? Brock fucking Rumlow slapping the death of _Bucky’s_ partner on a random group of unnamed people and Bucky sent to paperwork purgatory, one step up from the littering and jaywalking patrol until he “calmed down” or whatever?

Fuck Phillips.

“I know how it feels”.

Fuck him and the high horse he rode in on.

* * *

This wasn’t strictly authorized. All the same, Bucky’s badge hadn’t been taken away from him, and he could very well do whatever he pleased. It was the middle of the night, anyway, and you know what? He could patrol wherever he wanted, eh. Wasn’t like SAF stayed in their lane, so why the hell should he?

“Damn, Steve, I’m turning into you,” he muttered as he opened the trapdoor towards Liminal Space, a block away from their apartment building, next to the treeline bordering the bank of windows into space.

Flashlight in his mouth, he descended the ladder into the station’s shell, which was underfoot, no matter where you went. His dislike of the location hadn’t abated, and Steve’s death didn’t make it any better. This dark space, supporting everything that made the colony habitable, looked so much bleaker, now. He reached a platform overlooking the crisscrossing gangways and stopped to listen to the groans and shudders of the station’s outer shell. From this point of view, he could see all the way down to the colony’s shielding; all the hatches were like faraway torches, each illuminating their own portion of the footbridge.

He shuddered and pulled the lapels of his sheepskin jacket around his torso before he oriented himself. Steve had given it to him for his birthday two years ago. He had balked at the expensive gift back in the day, but tonight, it felt like the warm coat helped him bear the weight of space being so close. He couldn’t go get a spacesuit at this hour of the night; the jacket would have to do. Hopefully it would lend him even half of Steve’s confidence in proximity to vacuum.

Breathe in, hold, out.

His flashlight shone down and around the various passages until he finally found the one he was looking for. He could see how they had blocked the access to the hatch, the gangways barred closed around the crime scene. Next week would be a month and a half after the fact; it would soon be unblocked.

Reaching the spot where he and Steve had huddled for cover at the time made Bucky shudder. The cold, the press of hard vacuum, the memories, it all competed for first place in the anxiety parade marching through his brain. The crate had disappeared, and Rumlow had found nothing. Bucky would bet he’d done just the bare minimum. There had been no coroner’s name, only the basic detective sweep done on the scene, so it would have only taken Rumlow not securing a wide enough area for the whole scene to be a bust.

Bucky circled around the spot. If any wipeout had spilled onto the metal plates of the floor, finding it would be a doozy. Grey on grey in a badly-lit area with no idea on how to detect the stuff? God, this was Steve’s domain. Bucky was very didactic whereas Steve was more prone to thinking in leaps and bounds, making him especially fit to perceive when things weren’t in their rightful place. He’d had a keen sense of unlikely places where clues could be hidden.

Retracing his steps from their hiding place to where he had been bludgeoned upside the head, Bucky reached the gangway on which he had lain, stunned and disoriented. Under him there was a deck.

Blue eyes.

Bucky shook his head. He squinted and looked around again. According to that asshole Rumlow’s report, they had been attacked from the left when the last attacker had quite literally flown in from the upper parts of the Liminal Space.

It took some time for him to pick his way through the maze of walkways, but he finally found what he was looking for. Platform theta prime 12c overlooked the exact spot that Steve had occupied that fateful day. On it, several tool crates sat open, and there were two-metre-high stacks of titanium sheet plating covered by a tarp. Bucky put his backpack on the floor, right over the sign warning him against falling heavy objects and load bearings limited to two tonnes. He took out his fluorescent torch and UV goggles and set to work. He inspected every corner of this five-by-five platform, meticulously examining every scuff mark and weird splotch.

He was a realist and knew this could amount to nothing. This was little more than a storage bay, but after the first trace of scorch marks — most likely originating from the assailant’s thrusters — he knew there must be something else to find. He was no damn Bruce Banner, but he could make up for it by sheer dedication and obstinance.

It took him an hour to finally find what he was looking for. It was nearly hidden by the tarp. The titanium plating was straight out of the factory, so the edges hadn’t even been buffed yet. He could see their jagged edges, and also what looked like fibres caught in splotches of dried-up liquid.

“Told you I’d catch ‘em, Stevie.”

Taking the pictures and collecting the sample took at least another thirty minutes. Like hell was he going to make a mess of this. Yes, he was already very far removed from the usual process. He should have called… Banner. Rumlow, then Banner, he thought absently, while removing the fibres with his sterile tweezers. Protect, secure, call the agent in charge of the investigation if they’re not on the scene, call the science unit, take the addresses and details of all witnesses, and their first statements. Then go back to headquarters.

Fuck that.

He’d get to the bottom of Steve’s case and nobody could stop him.

* * *

Booking tickets to the Moon was such a good idea. The angry beep of a spine, but that’s okay. He was weightless anyway, everyone was here. He touched the floor and there were ants crawling on it, then up his arm.

He smiled and — don’t fucking open the door.

* * *

The mess was packed full, from cadets to superintendents all mingling together. Today was beef stew day, and everybody liked beef stew day. Hell, Bucky liked beef stew day, until his still-being-adjusted medication had deprived him of part of his sense of taste.

Bucky felt irritable after a full day of squinting at shipping manifestos, a long night of trying to piece together Steve’s notes, and still not fully recuperated from his Friday night turned Saturday morning gallivanting in Liminal Space until 5 a.m.

Mondays.

He gritted his teeth and got in line to get his food, trying to search discreetly for an empty spot somewhere, to no avail.

“Hey, Barnes!”

Damnit.

“Rumlow, fancy seeing you here.”

Rumlow sidled up to Bucky, all smiles, his t-shirt stretched over his muscles, the word POLICE emblazoned across his chest like an overeager cadet trying to advertise his fancy new job to the populace. All in all, Bucky found it pretty distasteful, and ignorant of the differences between policing and detective work, besides.

Bucky looked up the line anxiously, but that didn’t make it go faster.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for your loss.”

“What?” Bucky whipped his head around to look at Rumlow, who was sporting whatever best approximation of a sad face he could make.

“Rogers?” Rumlow pointed to both of them like there should be a link between Bucky, Rumlow and Steve. “I don’t know, man, Lukin never gave me a partner, but that must be shit, so…” He shrugged and then turned to pick a fork and knife. “I’m sorry, is all.”

There was a lot to unpack, here. No partner, ever? Rumlow acting concerned? What was happening here?

“Thank… you?” Bucky frowned and moved along with the line. “But you never liked Steve.”

“Eh.” He shrugged again, bunching up his frankly impressive trapezius. “You know…”

Bucky slid his tray down and looked away, already fed up with the subject and Rumlow’s fake solicitude. Looked like his medication dosage was still not enough to help him tamp down his anger. “No, actually, I don’t.” Bucky grabbed two slices of bread. “Actually, I remember you being a prick to Steve, so what the fuck are you on about, Brock?”

There was a sigh, and Bucky saw from the corner of his eye, Rumlow rolling his eyes axisward. “Ugh, if we’re gonna do this, at least wait till we’re seated. I’d like to eat a bit before losing my appetite.”

So Bucky waited, but it wasn’t in good grace. His jaw was clenched so tight it bordered on painful. Rumlow was in charge of Steve’s file. He was in Lukin’s unit, a unit Steve had been remarkably interested in. Whatever this was could be important. Maybe he’d get the occasion to suss out some details about what had been going on to pique Steve’s interest, besides his obvious dislike for Lukin.

It took ten more minutes to find a seat tucked in a corner somewhere. They sat under a fugly print advertising couple’s counseling. _Do you find yourself in increasingly numerous arguments? Don’t let it fester, don’t try to solve this alone, call the line!_ The carbon-fibre chairs creaked under their weight and the first few bites of food were shared in a tense silence. At least, it was tense on Bucky’s side. On Rumlow’s side of the table, everything looked fine and dandy as he relished the beef stew.

“Dang, that’s so tasty.”

“Rumlow.”

The guy grinned wolfishly and dunked some bread into his stew. “Don’t get your knickers twisted so tight, dude. Having beef is so rare, man.” He snorted. “Okay, so, I need to be sure you wanna hear this? Cause your buddy, your pal, he was some piece of work, man, and I don’t want you taking offense or something.”

Bucky just frowned harder.

“Alrighty then.” Rumlow ate a bit more. “You gotta know that Rogers was on Lukin’s shit list, right?”

“Who didn’t?”

Rumlow scoffed and scooped up some beans and meat. “Yeah, right? Well, I guess then that you know that your partner had a tendency to… overlook stuff.”

That seemed very paradoxical with the pile of notes Bucky was in the process of deciphering at home. Steve’s hyperfocus made him thorough. Bucky scowled. “What do you mean.” It wasn’t a question really, more of an injunction to explain.

“You remember the Donovan case?” It was time for Bucky to roll his eyes. This had been the big embezzlement case he’d raised hell to be put on with Steve back when Steve had been in Frauds. “Yeah, you do. You do remember Vision then?”

Bucky picked at his baguette slice; of course, he remembered Vision. He had been a key witness and an unforgettable person, too, half mods and half man, skin implants all red and grey when they didn’t shift to flesh tone.

Rumlow continued without waiting for Bucky’s acknowledgement. “Who interrogated him, hm? Rogers. And scrambling after the lost evidence, do you really think that was such a coincidence, with a transhumanist like Vision in the lot?”

It seemed that Rumlow had been right; the conversation hadn’t even really started, and Bucky had already lost his appetite.

“You never really listened to Lukin’s warning about trafficking back then, didn’t you?”

Bucky shook his head, not really liking where this was going, “He had no evidence to show for his dire warnings, Rumlow.”

“Right. I’ll leave you to those nice delusions of yours.” Rumlow slurped at the broth. “No wonder Lukin got so pissed. No wonder he doubted you’d get far in that last case of yours, overlooking yet again the same kinda clues, lying right under your noses.”

Bucky clenched his fists on the table, afraid he would soon end up swiping the whole meal to the floor in anger. “Are you implying that Steve tampered with evidence? That he misled a case? That he misled _**our**_ case?”

Rumlow gave him a flat stare, and chomped down the last of his beef.

“Why am I even talking to you? Fuck.” He started to get up, but Rumlow grabbed his arm, lightly but firmly.

“Come on, Barnes, sit down.”

“No, go to hell.”

“Yes, and I’m not fucking saying that Rogers was crooked. He was a good cop. Just had blind spots okay, we all have them.” A cop. Only douchebags like Rumlow called themselves cops. What the fuck was Rumlow playing at, blowing hot and cold, throwing around accusations and then saying everything was all right?

“You bet your ass he was good.” Bucky sat back down. Because in spite of the pain and hurt, and the absolute rage he felt at thinking about what Rumlow had tried to imply, he needed to understand. Understand what Steve had been looking for, what Rumlow was trying to tie Steve’s death to, what had really happened.

He needed to understand, find the fucking truth.

At this point, Bucky realised that there was no chance he’d get close enough to this without getting a transfer to Lukin’s team. It seemed like there were too many strings tied back to Vice: the notes, Steve’s case. What better way to discover what had happened, what was happening, than rubbing elbows with this asshole?

Bucky mulled over what to say next. He might have spoken last, but the silence felt like the ball was still in his court.

“I was there, if you don’t like Steve’s way of doing things, that’s fine, but I was there. We were thorough. With Donovan’s case as well as the Ahmed case. Steve… was a good detective, and Lukin was a dick to him for no reason.”

“Come on, Barnes, Rogers was always going to rub Lukin the wrong way, what with his prostheses on display like that.” He waved his hand in front of his face, as if Steve's whole face had been an implant. “Of course, he couldn’t do anything about it, but you know how Lukin is. And, problem is, right now, transhumanists are on the move. You can believe all you want that your old murder case had nothing to do with it, but I was on mics that day. There was chatter about it, exchanges, dates, locations, data. I hear stuff, you know.” He swirled the last of his beans and broth in his bowl, eyes still focused on Bucky, impressing his last statement on him. “Rogers was dead set on the SAF, and I can understand why. You were, too. And I know that. I was there, saw the tapes from that night. I nosed around a bit, and Rogers verbally splattered me on the sidewalk when he heard me asking around.”

Bucky frowned. He remembered Steve talking about crossing paths with Rumlow. He remembered the nosiness.

“So tell me, Barnes, tell me and be honest, do you seriously think you’d have pursued the transhuman route, then? Even if there had been some leads about black market dealings? And even if they had only been slightly linked to the case, would you have shared anything with Lukin’s team, with us, while your partner was around banging on the military’s door?”

Bucky gritted his teeth, remembering those few days on the case with as much anger as longing. His stomach was a writhing pit of tangled feelings, mourning, ire and nostalgia all so intertwined that they were indiscernible from each other. He felt sick.

He had to play this right too. He _needed_ to play this right.

“It was on our list.” He gulped forcefully, his throat tight. “Steve wasn’t. We were supposed to… to get there. I—”

“Hey, hey…” Rumlow leaned in his direction, suddenly weirdly sympathetic. “Hey man, stop, it’s okay. Sorry. Shouldn’t have been so… heavy handed.” It wasn’t usual for Rumlow to be thoughtful, but he looked at least a little bit sincere. All this back and forth between supportive and abrasive was weirding Bucky out.

“I just…” Bucky dived into his soup and didn’t say anything for a long while. First, because he was suddenly ravenous, and second, because he needed to gather back his wits. “I just need to find the fuckers that did that to him.” He needed an in, he needed to get closer to that stupid team in Vice.

“I’m on it, Barnes.”

A silence, the span of a breath. “Transhumans, huh?”

“I’m sure you read my report, soon as you got out of the loony bin.”

“I want in,” he said, resolute.

Rumlow tilted his head and raised one eyebrow.

“I want in, Rumlow.”

“You’re in the red tape squad. The investigation into those transhumans is Vice. They forked over Rogers’ case to me ‘cause you can’t investigate your own. I’m not giving it up.” Good old territoriality. Bucky could work with that.

“SAF had its hands in this traffic and you know it. You’ll need me because I can link the two cases.”

“Nah, I just need to be less conspicuous than you two were, and that’s a piece of cake.”

 _Oh the joys of two detectives trying to out-do each other_. “They cold-cased the whole Martina Ahmed case. You’ll need me to have the background on Steve’s death. You’ll need to interrogate me, too.”

“I don’t need diddly squat from you, my case is airtight.”

“Cute of you to think your case would hold water under scrutiny.”

“Nice of you to think you have any credible way to take it over.”

“I read it. You don’t have anything to help you bag a transhumanist in this shitshow of a case. There are no witnesses but me, most of the suspects on scene were either shadows or SAF, you have no motives, no evidence, no ties to that big transhumanist investigation you pretend exists.”

Rumlow clenched his jaw, a definite tell that he’d struck a nerve, in Bucky’s professional opinion. “I have enough evidence to pin a cop murder on just about anyone in this station.”

“Really? Because grainy out-of-range footage and body camera shots of faraway silhouettes won’t get you far in a court case.”

“I have more than that.” Rumlow sounded defensive.

“Do you, now?”

“Those are big words coming from a cop who lost his partner in a murder investigation they had to cold case.”

Bucky gritted his teeth but he knew how superficial Rumlow was in his work. “You shouldn’t get cocky when most of what your investigations have always relied on are barely-legal surveillance tapes and witness statements that won’t hold up in court for reasons we both know.”

They stared at each other in stony silence, both hunched over the table, their hands flat on it as if the smallest movement would be an admission of defeat. The tension was so thick that he’d need something even sharper than a knife to cut it. Finally, Rumlow turned his hands over on the table, palms up, as if consciously working on not getting riled up even further.

“I can get you in.”

Bucky’s jaw clenched and his heart jumped in his throat. His stomach twisted; yes, get him in, get him close. Then he could see what the fuck was going on. And that would also mean no dull-as-all-fuck desk duty. That would mean going back out there, and he could perhaps take some time looking for Laufeyson, that fucker. And maybe Odinson, even.

“I’ll tell you anything you want on that night and Ahmed’s case.”

“Oh, I think you’ll be able to do even better than that, Barnes.”

* * *

It only took five days to get his transfer. A suspiciously short five days.

He cooked, or he tried, at least. He called Grief Support. He moved out with the help of Sam and Becca. They asked how he was, and he said he was fine. They told him he could ask for anything and he said thank you in all the right places.

Wilson looked at him funny and asked him quietly how he was coping at work, if he had any problems, and how the change in caseload was going for him. How he dealt with “all that.” Bucky answered mildly, expressing the regular amount of frustration, he guessed, but Wilson squinted at him, the perceptive shit. No wonder he’d been Steve’s friend.

Bucky played at being Bucky.

Work was dull and no amount of therapy made closed doors any less scary. He talked to Claire about asking to be reassigned, but didn’t tell her why. She worried about the change of pace, he said trying to work like he did before only emphasized how much he missed Steve working with him. She compared them to a two-body system, binary stars. One of the bodies had disappeared overnight, and he needed to find a new point around which to gravitate. He nodded.

At night, he curled up with Alpine on his bed and waited for him to start snoring in purring little huffs, waiting for sleep to come. He waited and listened to the station noises, he thought of binary stars dying and sometimes he’d wake up screaming because he’d heard the hull groan and the air being sucked out slowly. His dreams were weird, his nightmares were draining.

Five days.

“You look like shit, Barnes.” Dugan shook a packet of biscuits in his face. “Eat up, you’re making my inner mama bear cry.”

Bucky looked at the fucking… cocaine-dodo feather biscuits and felt sick to his stomach. He reached for one. “Thanks.”

Dugan looked surprised and stared into the packet and then at Bucky. “You okay?” Dammit, he should have taken several. Bucky had always taken several _before_.

“Uh huh.” Bucky absentmindedly scrolled on his computer screen, still not used to the new workstation. He’d been moved once his temporary assignment to Frauds had been agreed on. It may have been two desks over from his former desk, but there was no clutter, all his stuff still in a box on the floor, and only one screen. He’d kept Steve’s stress ball, but he didn’t know what to do with it, so he’d stashed it in a drawer.

Dugan looked like he was gearing up for A Talk, of the variety that Bucky couldn’t care less about right now. But then thumping steps came into the crowded bullpen, and all of the officers swivelled their heads in unison, as if this was competitive synchronisation.

“Barnes,” Phillips barked into the office. “My office. Now.”

“Wow. What did you do? Spit in his coffee?”

Bucky sighed. “Careful, I might spit in yours.” Phillips had already disappeared into an elevator, so Bucky took his time riding to the commissioner’s floor. Then he followed the noises of a thunderous-looking Phillips banging the door to his own office open.

Just as he came in and closed the door, Phillips turned around and got into his face, showing him the screen of a tablet. “Care to explain this?”

Bucky stared dumbly at Phillips first, then looked at the screen and had to read it twice. “It’s… a transfer. Form?” One he hadn’t filed, but it looked like Lukin had filed it for him. Wow. That was fast, uncannily fast.

Phillips didn’t speak, but instead gestured as if to say, _you have the floor buddy_.

He’d worked on this speech. “I stated my desire to help with active investigative work, and I was told that my request would be reviewed.”

“You mean that you went over my head because I forced you to sit on your ass and rest for a while.”

“I just want to do my job, sir,” Bucky retorted angrily.

“Rogers’ case is being handled. Ahmed’s case is in the fridge, _waiting for you_.” Phillips pointed an irate finger at Bucky. “What is it? You want me to pull strings with Oversight? Get Roger’s file on top of the pile? Have Dugan investigate Ahmed?”

Yes, he wanted all of this, and to be at the epicentre of it too. “I just want to do my job.”

“You want to do your job badly, at the expense of your own sanity, you mean.”

Phillips seemed fired up enough to fight him, but suddenly, he deflated. Which was… so unlike him that it unsettled Bucky. “Sir, I—”

“You know what, son? If you are unstable enough not to see this is a mistake, then you are unstable enough to be on Lukin’s team.” He shook his head and swiped his finger across the screen, which pinged immediately afterwards. “What a waste.” Phillips then looked Bucky squarely in the eye. “I’ll be there to pick up the pieces, Barnes. Enjoy your ride.”

Phillips turned around to go sit in his chair. He muttered, “I should’ve known Rogers’ death would send you into a tailspin.”

Bucky didn’t know what to say. He felt his tablet vibrate, surely with the incoming alert about his transfer. He pondered for several seconds whether he dared to voice his thoughts, his doubts, his misgivings.

His big fucking worries.

Phillips was giving him a watchful look, sensing that something was hanging in the air. The air between them was like a live wire, thrumming with tension, ready to snap an electric arc.

“Sir.” Bucky took a breath. _Leap of faith_. “You do know that that hatch couldn’t have been opened by just anyone. Someone knew. Be it military, or… us.”

Phillips didn’t say anything.

Bucky bit his bottom lip. Maybe Steve had, perhaps… “Sir, Phillips.” He gulped back the first forty sentences he had in mind. Gauging by the depth of Phillips’ scowl, he thought he could safely go on. “Someone knew, and the military stalled us, and that was weird, but what’s weirder is how I found a stack of notes in Steve’s drawers focused on Lukin’s unit. You can’t tell me his case is taking a turn that could hold under Oversight’s scrutiny, so what’s going on, Chester?”

Phillips blew a world-weary breath. “I know, son. How stupid of me to think you’d wait till you had all your wits around you before trying to uncover a conspiracy.” Silence fell again in the office, making Bucky squirm. “You’re going into the lion’s den. Rogers hadn’t found anything before his death. This,” he waved the tablet, “this is going to bite you in the ass, Barnes. If you go unprepared, it’s gonna bite you. I’m going to say to you what I said to Rogers: pick your battles. Wait before you jump in… please.”

In that instant, Bucky figured he still could turn back. He could cry uncle, wait for that elusive day he’d be less depressed, more stable. He could let sleeping dogs lie, he could let Phillips handle all of it — the man surely had a plan, would set someone else to find out the truth. He wasn’t a commissioner for nothing.

He could go back to his one bedroom flat, he could learn to live without Steve, he could work on himself, not rub elbows with toxic people like Aleksander Lukin, he could forget everything about Loki Laufeyson, let someone else bring closure to Amira Ahmed.

“I can’t. I need to do this.”

Phillips harrumphed, unsatisfied, but seemingly understanding that Bucky wouldn’t budge. He nodded to the door. “Shoo. You know who to call when you inevitably get in over your head.”

Bucky exited the office and closed the door behind him, coming face to face with Rumlow, who was leaning cockily on the wall in front of Phillips’ office.

“You good, Barnes?”

Very much at a loss as to what answer he should give to that fucking question that everyone seemed hell-bent on asking him, Bucky just shrugged.

Undeterred, Rumlow patted his shoulder. “Well, pack up your stuff, we’ve got traffickers to catch, man.”


	6. Impulse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Steve wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Warning for_ : wrongful imprisonment, psychological torture, mild violence, a gun and gunshot wound (mildly graphic). The torture isn't dwelled upon heavily, but I didn't make light of it.
> 
> Please do not pay attention to the fact they should all be boucning around in the chapter since the Moon's gravity is about a sixth of a gee... **major handwave moment here**.

### Part II, Chapter 6: Impulse

In classical mechanics, impulse is the integral of a force over the time interval for which it acts. Since force is a vector quantity, impulse is also a vector quantity. Impulse applied to an object produces an equivalent vector change in its linear momentum, also in the same direction. […]

A resultant force causes acceleration and a change in the velocity of the body for as long as it acts. A resultant force applied over a longer time therefore produces a bigger change in linear momentum than the same force applied briefly: the change in momentum is equal to the product of the average force and duration. Conversely, a small force applied for a long time produces the same change in momentum—the same impulse—as a larger force applied briefly.

`― Wikipedia, “Impulse (Physics)”`

“To whomever it may concern,

I am deeply concerned to see such disingenuous thinkpieces as the one in issue 912, written and published in a periodical I held in such high regard.

I would like to point out several mistakes which I feel Mx. Tampa made that beg for counterpoints or corrections.

Firstly, the Moon Base, as it is repeatedly called, was never supposed to become a permanent military settlement. The assumption that Spacers, a deeply pacifist population, founded by the scientists who, may I remind you, routed the attempt at annexation by the GoogApple conglomerate by themselves, would voluntarily give up the Moon as a military bastion for the Space Armed Forces is ludicrous.

Secondly, it is erroneous of Mx. Tampa to say the Moon population has always been half civilian, half military. This might have been more or less true in the olden days, but before domes five and six were overtaken by SAF — thanks, might I say, to a UN joint resolution unjustly overriding the will of the Space governing body — all domes were inhabited by an overwhelmingly civilian population. The Moon is second only to Islands one and two as the greenhouse of Space. It would be downright idiotic for Spacers to willingly abandon their own hard-won gardens.

Finally, the misleading statistic of “only fifteen percent of the Space Armed Forces are Earth-born” should have been complemented by addition of the unavoidable fact that of those fifteen percent, most of them are positioned very high in the chain of command. Eighty-two percent, as per the last census of 2164, which smashes the argument that Spacers have sovereignty over their own military.

Spacers are still, for no admissible reason, held in check by an outside military power, and the farce that is the Moon Base is a testimony to this unjust, unofficially official domination.

Signed: a very upset reader.”

`― Lorient University Press, “Letter to the Editor: When Karens Use Their Powers for Truth”`

There had been static on the TV for such a long time, and outside it was snowing. He loved snow, loved winter, this was nice, like being snowed in, perhaps. If only the music wasn’t so loud, and the people not so chatty.

What was bothering him was that the boiler had died, and it was really beginning to get cold.

He thought Bucky might be in front of the TV.

He put his hand on the cold windowpane, where ice was tracing patterns that were indistinguishable _from an encrypted message saying where they were supposed to meet._

He put his hand on the windowpane, cold and cracked. He heard someone, so maybe Bucky had managed to repair the TV.

He heard static. An electric hiss seething over the sound of…

This — high-pitched buzz fizzling at a frequency so high you can barely hear it — that’s what they say you hear when you wake up from a coma, _Stevie._

_Hey, Steve!_

“Mister Rogers?”

He managed only a garbled sound and let his head fall to the other side.

“He’s awake.”

His sight was still graced by the grainy, nonexistent, TV-channel snow — so they hadn’t been snowed in? — and even though he could hear people talking around him, to him, moving around, he was nearly overwhelmed with that electrical noise, so high it felt like ultrasound.

He didn’t know how or why, but he felt like he’d lost time in there somewhere. Time skipped and his vision cleared slowly, the grainy screen slowly turning see-through. He was in a room. A medium-sized room, maybe, with next to nothing in it, beige walls, metal shelving units, harsh lights. Someone was talking, and his nose was itchy, so he…

“Wha…” His hand was immobilized. He heaved his head up to look at it and saw that his hand was bound to a railing, to the railing of the bed, of the hospital bed. “Wh—-what.” His voice felt strange to him, but he didn’t know why. There had been a catch in his voice, it was so scratchy.

Someone gave him some water. “Sip, please.”

He sipped some water, all the while feeling extremely disoriented and wary. He felt a cold sweat break out over his skin and ants running all over, from the crown of his head, slowly descending down his face to his collarbones, sternum, hip bones, ankles, like a swarm of ants taking over.

He felt very uncomfortable, his whole spine bruised and tender.

Someone moved his head and shone a penlight in his eyes. He didn’t even squint and felt no real urge to react to the light, which was, astonishingly, not that blinding.

The penlight was removed and the — doctor? nurse? — jotted something down on a tablet. “Can you hear my voice?”

He looked at the doctor or nurse and blinked. How does speaking work? “Hrmmm.” He felt a whirring noise in his ear, so deep in his ear that it felt like it was coming from inside his skull. “Yes.”

The doctor-nurse nodded. “Could you count to ten for me?”

He stared. The whirr got louder at some point, and then softer, as if the source had just been walking past. “O-one, two, seven, four, _dix, four, eight_ , deux deux deux…” He forced himself to stop repeating _deux_ , he knew that there was something wrong in what he’d said. Because of the doctor’s quizzical air and because his voice, at some point, had taken on a definite electrical tone, as if there had been feedback from a microphone.

_Okay, stop. Let’s take a deep breath._

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, … _nine-ten_.” Why was his voice cracking in this weird way? “Why am I bound to the bed?”

The nurse — he looked like a nice-enough man, if an unsmiling one — hesitated before adding some more remarks on his tablet. “Now, backwards from ten?”

The noise came back and went away, then came back and stayed. It was grating on his nerves. “Tenineightsevensixfivfourthreetwone.”

The doctor. Nurse. He had no nametag. The doctor blinked, took a second to parse the rapid-fire numbers he had spouted. He himself had to take a moment to parse them, too. “Oookay… Now can you tell me your name and the date, please?”

He opened his mouth to say it, he did. Then he clamped it shut.

The noise, whirr, buzz, rose to such a high pitch that he curled in on himself, trying to grab his head but incapable of doing so because of the cuffs that chained him to the railings. He gritted his teeth and his breath came with a gurgle, strained and strangled.

The doctor threw himself at a screen beside the bed and then walked over to a cabinet. He was quickly preparing what looked like an injection when Steve uncurled and felt an answer pass through his lips as he exhaled a shaky breath: “Steven Grant Rogers, it is May twenty-fifth, four thirty-four and fourteen seconds Standard Space Time.”

The doctor, syringe halfway plunged into a bottle filled with clear liquid, blinked at Steve, bewildered.

Steve looked down and, where his nails had cut into his palms when he’d curled up in pain, his skin was tinged with grey. It was like seeing his skin painting itself into pristineness, grey pixels building up over the small wounds and then converting themselves to the right colour.

“What the fuck have you done to me?”

* * *

They had sedated him. He’d also been moved while knocked out. How did he know? That, he couldn’t say. Like his eerie inner sense of time, accurate, apparently, to the second, he also had a strange sensation of past displacement. He’d been knocked out for two days and they had moved him.

For a brief moment he wondered who he was, where he was, what was going on.

It came in a rush of chittering, crisp electrical buzzes, his name, the date, a doctor, sedation, where where where?

He felt around and immediately registered that his hands weren’t bound anymore. He blinked his eyes and then looked around.

Three walls of off-white paint on steel and a wall of reinforced glass, with only the corridor’s light to illuminate the room, a thick glass door, with wire mesh cast inside the glass. There was a toilet bowl on his left, partitioned off so he wouldn’t be seen from the corridor, but well in view of his bed. There wasn’t much more, a sink, a screen embedded in the wall on his right, turned off. He didn’t know how, but he was pretty sure it was completely disconnected.

Steve — his name was Steve Rogers — sat up and tried to take stock of himself. The high whine of electronic noise rang in his ears and he tried to shake it off, putting his pinky finger in his ear. The noise didn’t abate, only moved. He could feel it, circulating around his skin.

How could you even feel a noise?

Steve was lying there, trying to understand what was happening to him, when the high-pitched whine got so strong it was painful. He winced and rubbed his brow, and the pain disappeared immediately. The sound went back to the lower tone of simple… alertness. And then the click of a microphone resonated in his cell and he turned his head to see…

Who…

She was a woman, bent over his desk, he felt irritation, what desk?

Ants were scurrying again under his skull.

A woman, angry, contained, she had no right. Chevrons for her rank on epaulets.

“Staff sergeant Hill,” he stated, like a fact he’d always known instead of a guess he’d involuntarily blurted.

“Hello, officer.”

So he was an officer. The ants scurried again and then stopped — he was a detective officer in the Island 1 detective force, ID 54985870, he had a partner and a chief officer and their names were — he sniffed, felt something hot and syrupy drip from his nostril and wiped it off.

His hand came back wet and red.

“Mama?”

“Rogers?”

Steve turned his hand and another drop of blood dripped onto it. “Five.” Someone called him again from the other side of the glass wall. “Four. Nine.”

“We have a problem again.” She wasn’t speaking to him.

His nose was runny with blood and he could hear himself reciting his badge number like an automaton.

“Rogers!”

Steve jerked his head up, his number rambling cut short.

“What the hell did you do to me?” he said coolly. He stood up and went up to the glass door — glass door, ants, a glass door separating him from somebody, and then death — “ **What did you do to me?!** ” He slapped his hands against the glass and only registered at the margins that his voice had gone distinctly buzzy, as if he was speaking through static. Or was this just the noise in his head?

“We saved your life, officer,” Hill retorted from the other side of the door. She took a step back.

Steve wiped away some more blood that had trickled down his chin, and then smeared it on the glass. “Saved my life for shit, yeah!” He’d died, he’d had a brace, prostheses, he’d been cured, he’d been sick, he’d been alive, he’d been dead.

The whine of the static hum increased — this was a warning, he didn’t know how he knew — and up there on the wall, a hiss. Steve took a step back. “What is this?” Gas? Maybe they’d like to sedate him again.

He felt like his bronchial tubes were clogged, as if he had a very bad cold. He threw himself on the floor, hoping that he could delay the inevitable. He checked, and Hill was still here, visibly checking that everything was going according to plan.

Minutes passed. He felt dizzy and weak and so, so mad. He still hadn’t fainted, so he crawled towards the door again, intent on doing who knew what. He couldn’t care less, he just wanted out.

“I think we have another problem,” Hill said into her comm unit.

Steve stood up and limped to the glass. “Answers,” he growled. So mad. He’d died, he’d been so cold and alone and lost.

He knew her. “Come back, Hill,” he heard someone say. The voice came from her earpiece. He could hear the voice from her earpiece?

She cautiously retreated down the corridor. Steve slammed his hands on the glass as she turned a corner, and screamed in rage, “I’LL GET MY **ANSWERS**!”

* * *

Days followed nights. They left him alone for six of them. Six days, all the same. Lights got turned off, there would be night following the days. A new day would begin, a blank slate, between the same three off-white walls. Meals got delivered through a double trap door that made it so that he couldn’t reach for his jailer’s hand.

Good thinking on their part, or he would have ripped the fucking hand off after the fourth day cloistered in there like an Earth lion in its circus cage.

Steve knew nobody could out-stubborn him. But six days alone and he could feel his sanity unravelling at the edges.

He thought there was somebody who could, but he wasn’t sure who. He wasn’t sure, either, about what he should try to remember, as he was still in a cell in an undisclosed location, detained by the military. He’d tried for days to remember anything pertaining to his life, but had come up empty.

What was going on with his mind? What was going on in his brain?

Steve huffed a breath. If he really was a detective — he was, he knew, also there was someone important there, but he needed to stay silent on this, he needed to keep quiet, he wasn’t sure why — he could probably apply some of his “investigative methods” to help with the situation.

He got up from the bed he had been lying prone on. A bed in the far corner of the room. He evaluated the size of the cell at four by four metres, which was a very roomy place to keep a prisoner in, he thought.

There wasn’t much else. The small sink at the foot of the bed, and, tucked into the other corner of the room, was the toilet with the waist-high partition that hid it from the door. The screen had stayed black and blank for days on end, so his inkling that it had been disconnected was right.

The door itself was made of the same glass as the fourth wall of the room. Clear glass, reinforced; he walked to the transparent wall and put his hand next to one of the flaking red imprints he had left there. Nobody was going to wash it off in his stead, and he quite liked the ominous effect it had on the more nervous soldiers passing by.

He examined the imprint cautiously, feeling something like déjà-vu.

It looked ghastly.

Blood flakes… shot through with grey powder.

The white noise that had been coming and going ever since he’d woken up the first time made a comeback. Steve shook his head. No, he didn’t want to remember specifics, not right now, where anything he knew might be pried out of him. They hadn’t questioned him, _yet_.

Steve looked up. Two cameras were there, he knew. He didn’t know how he knew, just that the whining hiss in his mind morphed into an ant-crawl on his skin or under his skull every time he looked in the direction of the cameras. He had also noticed the two small exhaust ports that had pumped gas into the cell.

How he had managed to stay conscious was a mystery.

Blood flakes shot through with grey.

_Okay, stop. Let’s take a deep breath._

Okay stop, let’s-

Someone had said that to him once.

Steve closed his eyes.

Steve breathed. In.

Out.

The scurrying of ants and the whine of microphone feedback, the ultrasound resonating in the bone right behind his ear. He felt his skin crawl all along his spine, the phantom touch of someone’s fingers on his neck. Steve raised his hand and put his fingers to the same place and felt around.

His skin felt raw and smooth, hard like a cast around the location of his — spine brace. He’d had a spine brace. He remembered.

Fingertips, beeping noises, glances in the sunshine, a sweet tooth and a nice smile.

He’d told himself he shouldn’t remember.

Steve wiped his nose and stared at the blood on his hand. He brought his hand to the glass wall.

He’d died. Right beside…

“Bucky…”

* * *

Days.

Nights.

Steve needed a plan. His nosebleeds seemed related to getting memories back, or to when the… thing crawling under his skin was activated.

Meals.

Sleep.

It felt like a slow descent into madness. He exercised like crazy just to expend some of his nervous energy. He had nothing to fiddle with, and had shredded a bedsheet in his sleep at some point, so he had gotten a new one with his following meal.

Now he fiddled with the threads and pieces of fabric of his former bedsheet.

Fiddle fiddle, walk walk walk, exercise. Sleep.

Forty-eight days since he died.

He finished his sink bath, peeved that there were no mirrors anywhere — not because he wanted to craft a shank or something, but because his spine brace felt wrong. He couldn’t take it off for some reason, and he wanted to check on it. He felt his nose start bleeding again and bent over the sink warily. He looked closely at the water spiraling down the drain as it ran reddish-brown before it got clearer. Steve shut the water off and waited.

Nothing of note.

Well, if there were nanoparticles in his blood, surely he wouldn’t be able to see them, they were too faint, too small.

His nose felt fine again.

“I’m alright, mama.” He said to no one in particular.

He went back to his bed. He needed to investigate — he needed something to do — but not be too conspicuous. So, he could heal at least some scratches if he was remembering correctly what had happened before he’d been sedated. Sedation seemed to work differently depending on whether it was injected or inhaled. And, in addition, it looked like he could… filter out gases, if the recollection of that moment was correct. He’d felt that sensation, a membrane-like feeling in his throat.

Question was, was it controllable at all?

It looked like Laufeyson could control whatever he did at will. Or at least Steve supposed so. Would Steve be able to disappear like Laufeyson could?

Maybe better not put this theory to the test in plain view of two cameras.

He got up and walked around the room, concentrating on the noises in his head. He giggled all alone thinking that it was a bit like listening to voices.

They clearly got louder the closer he got to the cameras. He put his hands on the wall and felt around. The crawling under his skin that felt like ants became more pronounced when he ran his hands along several parallel lines, which swerved upward at some point, towards the camera he had approached.

Okay, so he could sense… at least cameras and power lines, if he could hazard a guess.

He should have done that days ago.

Then again, days ago, he had been still reeling from… dying. Sedation. Rage. Despair.

“Give yourself a break, Stevie,” he sing-sang.

Steve meandered around in the cell, feeling for anything electric running under his feet, in the flooring. Under his hands, in the walls. The screen had a different vibration, a sluggish sound and no running electricity was coursing to it.

So electronics and electrical lines had a… different feel. Different sounds.

Interesting.

He felt the arrival of someone before he even heard them.

Breathing calmly seemed to give him a better handle on this… thing. Power. Technological sensitivity.

Steve went up to the door. “Are you here to give me answers?” he asked sweetly to the approaching soldier — whoever they were.

The steps didn’t falter, and the soldier finally turned the corner and came to stand before the cell — he had an earpiece, an e-S.P.A.R.K., and several implants of unknown nature, if Steve’s new thing worked accurately.

The man was…

Tall, broad, a burly man with dirty blonde hair cropped short. His clothes looked weird, for some reason — no they looked like typical SAF BDUs. Steve blinked the memory away. This was getting weird.

He read the nametag and squinted at the epaulettes.

Captain Odinson.

Steve sniffed through his incoming nosebleed, a loud and disgusting snirfle that tasted like copper in the back of his throat.

“Well, well, well.”

They looked at each other, each on a different side of the door. Thor Odinson’s face, now devoid of any mask or goggles obscuring the view, looked both world-weary and surprised at seeing Steve there. He was holding what might have been Steve’s dinner.

And Steve remembered him, he remembered Thor Odinson and Loki Laufeyson.

He remembered Odinson as the one who had sent them into a trap in Liminal Space.

Steve put his hands on the glass door.

“I’ll be out. And you’ll be first,” he rumbled, eyes set dead on Odinson’s. Steve pushed at the glass, feeling so fucking enraged at being here, right now. “I’m gonna get out. And you’re going to regret this.”

Odinson shook his head, his eyes getting rounder by the minute. Steve spat some of the blood that was still pooling in his mouth and trickling from his nose. Thor looked at the red spot splattered between them and, thus, didn't notice immediately what was happening.

To be fair, Steve didn’t notice immediately what was happening, either.

There was suddenly a low sound of material strain, then a very small splintering noise.

“Odinson, what’s going on? Jailbreak alarms are ringing.”

Steve looked to Thor’s earpiece and puzzled over what the voice had said before looking down.

Thor’s eyes fell on the same spot as Steve’s; he knew. They were both looking at the small difference in position between the door and the glass wall. Looking at the minute hairline crack in the glass door, near the spot where it was anchored to the glass wall.

Their eyes met again.

“Odinson. Report.”

“Nothing Ensign, Rogers is just leaning on the wall, and it looks to be very sensitive, is all.”

Steve tilted his head.

…

_Well, well, well._

Odinson stooped low and put the tray down on the ground and slid it into the box built into the wall, reinforced with steel bars. Steve could access the box and get the tray…

They looked at each other once again

“Eat up, Rogers.”

Steve spat on the wall then traced FUCK YOU with the disgusting mix of spit and blood.

He then pressed his hand back to the door and applied some force to it. Thor addressed his earpiece again. “If your sensors are picking up something again, I think you’ll need to recalibrate them. Or else this guy’s gonna make you go crazy.”

“Roger, Captain Odinson.”

Then he left, and Steve stopped leaning forcefully on the glass door.

He looked at his hand in puzzlement.

He didn’t need to be at a Dernier or Banner level of science geekiness to know that his regular self would never have been able to apply enough force to budge, least of all _bend_ and _splinter_ a fifteen-centimetre-thick glass and titanium door.

As Steve washed his mouth clean, his little crazy-eyes shtick over, he thought that it was fine. That was fine. Everything was fine.

Technopathy? Increased strength?

Yeah, he could work with that.

* * *

He’d been reluctant to push on the door in the next few days after his little revelation. Waking up fifty-five days after his death, so discombobulated it took him several minutes to notice that he’d been repeating his badge number aloud, alone in his cell… yeah. That had cinched his decision not to wait, and try to escape by any means necessary.

Fifty-seven days. Then interrogations started.

He woke, he bathed in the sink feeling his scraggly beard and wincing at his state, he wandered, he looked at the glass wall, at the glass door, leant on it for a while. He lost time.

Because between one blink and the next, there was Staff Sergeant Hill and her stone-faced attitude.

“Rogers?”

He scritched at the glass absentmindedly. “Yes?”

“We have been advised by the medical personnel monitoring your room that you should be in a good enough state to answer some of our questions.” She meant in a desperate enough state. She meant…

“Our?”

She smirked and tapped her left epaulette. “Armed forces.”

He tried leaning on the glass door, without pushing too much.

“Officer Rogers, we found you on Saturday, the twentieth of April, drifting in space near the hatch where two of our soldiers were attacked. Were you the one who fired towards them?”

He startled. “What?” _Bullets, against regulation, they’d expected e-S.P.A.R.Ks, not that_.

Liminal Space. There’s a glass door and Bucky is right behind it, _oh no, oh no, nonono…_

He woke up some time later to an acrid aftertaste in his mouth and the lingering scent of the strange gas they had tried to knock him out with. Steve figured out quickly that they had taken advantage of his passing out to open the cell and check on him.

That night, as the light dimmed, he recited his badge number and thought about his escape. About the fact that they were finally ramping up the intimidation, or had at least decided on a course of action.

He had no idea how the military worked, nor of the specificities of the regiments based wherever he was, the Moon if he could hazard a guess based on the local gravity. Maybe he could stall, delay, derail the interrogations, try not to crack under the pressure. He could anger them with evasions and theatrics, maybe, but then he needed to bank on no one here having the brilliant idea of torturing him. Who knew if one of those guys, irritated by Steve’s antics, could decide that no one can hear you scream from space, all the way in Geneva?

If he could resist being knocked out, this could be another way he could escape, maybe.

He slept. He woke up. Fifty-eight days. He pushed on the door at random times, sometimes hard, other times lightly, so that jailbreak alarms wouldn’t be triggered every time.

Sixty-three days, no Hill, and much less an intervention team barging down the hallway.

Interrogation sessions came back at day sixty-five, and did not cease.

Most of the questioning would end up with him flat on his back on his bed.

Hill would relentlessly ask the same questions. Did he fire on the soldiers? How did he end up spaced? Where did he find the wipeout? Where was the wipeout crate? Who had fired on the soldiers? Who threw him out of the airlock?

Same questions. Variations of the questions. At some point, he’d get tired, or something would trigger him. It would often happen because of a noise, or because she referred to his partner, or because he would stop paying attention and in this half-aware state, some words ended up getting to him in a wildly different way.

He’d panic.

He’d stumble, breathing all out of whack, hands shaking and wipeout — it must be the wipeout, right? — going crazily loud in his head.

Sometimes he lost consciousness, sometimes he lost minutes or hours. He knew that they used the gas, knocking him out the rest of the way.

His panic attacks ended up being pretty convenient, in a way. When they knocked him out, they would use the time he was out of commission to wash him, check for injuries, trim his beard, his nails. It was so fucked up, but he could also feel clean again, which was priceless.

He lost count of days, the wipeout counting them for him. He’d wake up, talk to his mama, answer questions sometimes, faint or not, wake up clean, maybe.

And he would lean and push on the door.

Because he had not forgotten his plan.

His goal was to progressively weaken the door. He would go to the door, lean and lean, and push and push, slowly, day after day, looking at the small cracks that spider-webbed out from the hinges.

He timed and counted down the seconds whenever he’d panic, in order to check how long it took for people to get down to his cell, who would come, and with what gear. He got shocked and tranquilized while he played the part — or didn’t play — of the sick and dying.

It was all worth it, if only for the level of frustration he managed to inspire in his captors.

Sixty-five, sixty-seven days. He’d died, he’d come back. He needed out.

Walk walk walk, push push push.

One day, as he panicked, they brought Odinson in, and in the haze of his confusion, he heard “Steve, please, where’s Loki?” And he couldn’t answer, couldn’t answer.

Because he didn’t know, because he wasn’t sure. Because they had been looking for him.

Later on, as panic had given way to boredom, he realised they must have tried to switch tactics. Use his addled state to try and wring out answers. And they were looking for Laufeyson.

His mind, riddled with ADHD, was slowly becoming the equivalent of a zoo populated with those cymbal-clapping plush monkeys.

He needed to get out of there, or he was going to go crazy.

He needed to get out of there before they decided to experiment any further on him. He’d heard some of the chatter on the earpieces of soldiers passing by. There was talk about testing his stamina and healing rate. How does one go about testing healing rates? With pointy things, if Steve had to guess, and he really didn’t want to be poked in his soft parts with pointy things.

Odinson was always the guy to bring him his meals, but why a captain got assigned this task, he didn’t know. Apart from the hazy times he got interrogated, the guy was quiet, but he’d send him glances that Steve couldn’t decipher.

Day eighty-two.

He woke up. He walked around. Last time he’d been shocked was three days ago, his nails were trimmed, his hair was on the longer side.

Steve got up to do his daily “push against the door until the alarm rings” exercise. He’d set the alarm to blaring so much in the last twenty-five days that sometimes the half-dozen soldiers didn’t even bother to come outside of the regularly scheduled questioning time. The day before yesterday, he’d only had the PA system ask, in a tired voice, that he please stop leaning on the fucking wall. Yesterday, he’d heard a tiny cracking sound. He’d stopped, counting his blessings and hoping he’d get out soon.

Steve let his hand trail along the cell wall, following the winding path of electricity humming through it. His mind was otherwise occupied with his hundredth, if not thousandth review of the Ahmed case, the hundredth, if not thousandth idle rehashing of the fateful night he’d been spaced. 

Steve reached the door.

A door not unlike the one he was spaced out of.

Steve looked at the camera and smirked before he turned around and leaned his back against the door in an outwardly-apparent lazy sprawl. But really, he was applying just enough pressure to feel the door give slightly and feel the delicate scrawl of ants under his skin signalling that an electric current was circulating. Signals were being sent. Detectors were being triggered. He wagered that someone up there was currently tearing his hair out after the hundredth seemingly false alert.

He’d had time on his hands. He’d had time to think about this. Fridge logic, they called it.

One does not simply walk into outer space.

Opening a hatch requires access codes. Maintenance permits. Override passwords.

He had been pushed — no, _tackled_ — into that hatch. The hatch had been opened and the… person… the assailant had smashed the keypad.

Someone had known they would be there. Someone had targeted them, Bucky or Steve, maybe both. Could have been the military — likely, with regard to his current situation, but then why save him? Could have been Lukin, but how would he have known that Steve would be there, and how could he have known Steve was looking into Vice? It could have been whoever had attacked the SAF soldiers first.

Could have been anyone, really.

Steve hummed to himself.

He heard a hiss and a whine in his ear, then the very much over-this-whole-shit voice of the PA system guy. “Rogers, please stop leaning on that door. I’ll even get Odinson to bring you crackers.” Steve snorted. Boy, was he going out of his mind if that simple interaction made him laugh. He recited his badge number by rote, without thinking about it too much.

Seeing as how Odinson was behaving, it couldn’t have been him that tried to send them to their demise, right? Or else, what was he playing at?

All of a sudden there was a creaking groan which nearly hid the sound of approaching footsteps. Steve was about to turn around to greet the incoming soldier with some of his special Steve-branded shittalk, but he couldn’t find purchase on the door he was leaning on. A hideous cracking noise resounded, and Steve fell on his ass amongst the remnants of the shattered glass door.

“Fuck.”

Thankful for all the times he had triggered alarms and set off alerts until his surveillance had been relaxed by his very unique powers of aggravation, he figured this could be a good time as any to flee that forsaken military prison. The simple fact that he could was completely mind-blowing.

His fingers swiped at the metal mesh and cracked pieces of glass spread out under him and he looked up. And up. Into the very surprised face of none other than Captain Thor Odinson with a food tray, looking speechless.

“Oh well, guess we’re breaking out now, huh?”

Thor frowned. “Rogers, you—”

Steve got up to his feet in a rush and grabbed the tray from Odinson’s hands and bashed him on the skull with it.

Thor’s head snapped to the right. After a moment, he turned back to Steve.

Oh.

In the dead silence that fell on the narrow corridor, they both heard Thor’s earpiece crackling to life. “Captain Odinson, the alarm is ringing _again_ , could you tell Rogers to fucking stop that shit.” Seemed like he’d annoyed them so much, they’d even stopped checking the cameras. This wouldn’t buy him much time though.

“No problem, Volstagg.” Thor cracked his knuckles. “You heard the guy, Rogers.”

Steve looked around quickly, checking that the chair Hill always sat on to interrogate him was still there in the corner of the corridor.

“Because I know you can hear him, Rogers.” Thor took a step forward.

Steve’s eyes snapped back to the hulking mass of soldier blocking his way to freedom. He heard a faint sound of electricity coursing through Thor’s forearms. Implants?

He dashed to the corner. Thor, bigger, bulkier Thor, wasn’t as quick. Steve grabbed the chair, and when Thor reached him, he bashed him on the skull again.

Steve was more forceful the second time, strength and wilfulness to hurt decoupled by his panic, and Odinson got thrown to the side. As he was catching himself, Steve tried to dash up the corridor, but his foot caught on Thor’s own foot and he tripped Steve up, sending him sprawling to the floor.

Shit.

Steve scrambled to get up but Thor was faster and caught him by the collar and put him in a chokehold. Steve brought his hands to Thor’s thick forearm, scratching and tearing at the fabric of his fatigues, his feet windmilling wildly in the air. He must be enhanced. He must…

“Be more convincing in your attempt next time.” Thor’s voice whispered directly in his ear. Steve gave a strangled, wordless cry. “And if you really escape the next time, tell Loki I’m sorry.” He squeezed his arm even tighter; Steve’s head was suddenly flooded with a sudden strident static whine.

Steve brought both hands behind his head and grabbed at whatever part of Odinson’s face he could reach. There was a scuffle as Thor tried to dodge Steve’s nimble fingers, and Steve got progressively more desperate to get his fingers on anything squishy he could hurt Thor with.

Steve could hear his strange sixth sense alerting him with its strange hiss to chatter on the surveillance system.

Fuck, he was never getting out.

His fingers finally found Thor’s eyes, and one of the implants on the side of his head.

He pulled. He pushed.

Thor yelled in pain and let him go.

Steve stumbled, but managed to take advantage of Thor’s disorientation and pain to knee him in the balls. Thor folded like a wet paper towel.

Ouch.

Steve turned to run, but Odinson grabbed his foot — again!? Was this a foot fetish? Steve spun around to kick him in the shin or the chin or anywhere, really, but was arrested by Thor’s desperate look.

“Fake a fall.”

What?

Thor pulled on his leg brusquely and Steve let himself fall ungainly to the floor. As he scrambled to stand up again, Thor pulled again, and in the ensuing mess of limbs, he could speak without being seen or heard by surveillance cameras.

“Melissa Joan Gold, Abner Ronald Jenkins. Tell Loki I’m sorry and I’m coming back.” Fuck, this was important, but the zipping buzz of communication firing through the electrical lines alerted Steve that he didn’t have time for this nonsense bullshit. He kicked Odinson in the guts so that he would let go and dashed into the corridor, running full tilt towards the junction at the end. He heard running footsteps from the left, so he turned right.

Every camera he passed, he heard. His weird sixth sense was like a buzz alerting him to every surveillance device pointed at him as he rushed down hallway after hallway, desperately trying not to think about one of those doors suddenly opening to spit a bunch of soldiers out at him.

He could feel every single day of his incarceration like ichor sluicing off of him, replaced by pure adrenaline and the strength lent by the wipeout coursing through his body.

He managed to reach a set of stairs unscathed and ran to the stairwell. There was a plaque.

“Hangar, hangar, hangar, fuck!” He struck the wall with his hand in frustration, putting a dent in the brickwork. The plaque only indicated office levels.

He threw himself into the stairwell, anyway, only to hear people running up and down from afar.

Shit.

He dashed back into the hallway and closed the door, punched it without thinking — how much fucking stronger had he gotten in spite of his imprisonment? — and looked around, looked up, saw two parallel railings holding up the striplighting in the hallway.

Whatever worked.

He jumped, held onto one rail with one hand and pushed on the ceiling with the other.

Okay, maybe he wasn’t that strong.

As soon as the thought came to his mind, the rail gave way, peeling off of the ceiling with an abominable screech. Steve tore the piece of metal from the ceiling and bent it into a shape that would act as a door stopper for the stairwell.

He could go neither up nor down, and people would soon be coming at him from behind.

He could hear soldiers approaching in the stairwell.

Fuck, he was fucked. Shit!

He turned around, saw a closed door and, in his panic, misjudged his strength and tore it off its hinges.

An office with a desk and another door in the far wall. The soldier inside was already getting out of his chair. He’d probably heard the commotion from Steve playing demolition man with the base’s infrastructure. They stared at each other for half a second, the soldier half crouched behind his desk and Steve still holding the door handle in his hand while the door was lying behind him in the hallway.

For lack of anything better to do, Steve threw the door handle at the soldier, who was trying to draw his weapon. The guy protected his face and Steve took advantage of his distraction to flip the soldier’s desk on top of him. Then he took off towards the second door. There was another plaque here, this one with a name, or maybe that night’s menu, he didn’t fucking care.

Another door torn off its hinges later, Steve barged in on someone who must have been brass. Big office. Huge desk. A greying-at-the-temples angry guy in fatigues laden with a tapestry of stitched-on decorations.

Behind him, a bank of windows overlooked a gigantic hangar.

Towards freedom.

Tapestry McBrass wasn’t green behind the ears, though, and didn’t lose any time gawking at Steve before he grabbed his weapon and shot straight at him. But Steve had seen his gesture and threw himself to the right behind a leather armchair.

The silence after the shot was deafening. Steve could hear the ringing in his ears, and for the first time in days, he knew this wasn’t his fucking technopathy, this wasn’t the machine god whispering where the cameras were.

Then came the pain.

Another shot rang out, but he was slouched so far down on the floor that it destroyed the chair more than anything else.

He looked down at his abdomen, now red with the blood that was drenching his drab prison-issue shirt.

“Never thought you’d dare, Rogers.”

Christ on a sticker.

“Get out from under there and I might consider continuing to treat you fairly.”

Steve clenched his jaw, seeing red. Those fuckers had held him for— and now they—

“Fuck YOU!” he yelled, jumping out of his hiding spot, prepared to dodge the next shot coming his way.

The man fired in his direction again, but Steve ducked, gripped the bottom of the armchair, and fucking threw it in the fucker’s face.

The man sidestepped the chair, but it didn’t help him avoid Steve, who came flying across the desk and tackled him to the ground.

The gun flew wide and the man tried to grab at Steve’s face, but it was a lost cause. Steve bashed his skull once into the floor, and with his newfound strength, the blow was sufficient to daze him and stop him from fighting back.

Breathing harshly, his belly on fire, his mind blurry with adrenaline and fading rage, Steve struggled to get up. The man — Colonel Ross, huh — groaned in pain at his feet.

Steve spat blood onto the floor, feeling queasy. Was he going to bleed out? He went to retrieve the gun and fired a shot at the windows, which could be bulletproof, anyway.

The shot pinged off the glass and buried itself in the wall behind him. Steve yelled, then shouted at the window, as if it might crumble under his fury. He wanted to empty the cartridge at it, but it was empty already, and with each step forward he took, the gun clicked, clicked, clicked, making him more and more furious. Finally, he threw the weapon at it with a howl and then punched the glass.

Which made the window pane pop out of its frame.

Steve watched the window crash to the ground ten metres down and looked at his fist, covered in blood, grey powder, and slowly healing bruises.

“How am I going to explain this to Bucky?”

Behind him, Colonel Ross groaned again. Steve frowned down at his abdomen, which felt strange, weird, in a bad but not painful way. Knowing that this really wasn’t the time to ask himself questions, he turned back to Colonel Ross, who was pushing himself to his knees, and shoved him with his foot, sending the man sprawling on the floor again. Then — and he knew he had no more time left, chatter on the earpiece of the soldier in the other room was ringing in Steve’s own skull — he took a running leap towards the now empty window frame and a ten-metre fall.

If he made it out alive, Bucky was going to fucking skin him alive, oh mother of fuck.

* * *

Steve winced in pain as he pulled the throttle on the ship he had just stolen. The acceleration glued him to the seat for several minutes as the main launchpad hasps unhooked from the ship, slingshooting him into space. He grappled with the throttle for a while, matching thrust with speed, using mindless brutal strength until the acceleration slacked off and he finally was…

Weightless.

And alone in the cramped cabin.

He hurt all over, from exertion, from his fall, from the fight, from the… bullet.

He’d jumped, hoping for the best; an elevated platform had broken his fall, preventing him from plummeting to his death. He’d tucked and rolled, teeth rattling, chest heaving, and guts roiling. The hangar doors had still been open because another ship had just entered, which was just his luck because that had meant…

Distraction. Accessible vacuum suit. A ship available.

He’d stolen a one-man ship, still docked right there and hatch open, not questioning his good fortune.

The lack of gravity and the disarray in the hangar, with most of the soldiers redirected to chase him around inside the base, it all played into helping him escape.

All in all, he was expecting this stroke of luck to run out soon enough. That was too many good coincidences in a row. Maybe there wouldn’t be enough fuel? He checked the tralphium gauge and the back-up gauge, all showing sufficient stock. Thrusting power was around eighty-nine percent, very far from compulsory maintenance or suboptimal efficiency.

Okay, so maybe his luck would run out on something else.

The Moon was behind him, getting progressively smaller in one of the screens on the dashboard. He checked the different views of the ship, no visually obvious damage to the hull. No ship in pursuit, which was odd, but he tried not to question it. That was a problem for later.

Prioritising. He needed to prioritise. First, not sending himself on a collision course with Venus.

Next… not bleeding out.

After Steve initiated the trajectory calculations on the ship’s computer, in order to make sure that the standard Moon-Island 1 course would do, he stripped out of his suit and his shoddy prison-issue shirt and looked down at himself.

He was going to have to clean the wound. He closed his eyes, breathed slowly until he calmed down, then caught his shirt, floating weightlessly in the cockpit.

After some digging around in the ridiculously small galley — which really wasn’t more than two storage units sandwiching the standing cabinet sleeping quarters — he finally found a medkit and proceeded to clean his wound, in starts and stops because he had to pause every so often to take a breath and try not to vomit or faint, or both.

No reason to panic, he just had a bullet in his abdomen and a gross feeling of non-pain, a vague numbness coupled with the constant sensation of crawling all over his skin and in the vicinity of his wound, no biggie.

In the end, the wound looked simultaneously more and less gruesome than he would have thought. The skin around it looked slightly bruised but otherwise pristine, with no apparent ruptured vessels or any gnarly details like ripped skin — hurrah? The edges of the wound, though, had that new-skin look… where it wasn’t grey and swarming with bubbles of greyish-red blood. The blood fucking moved, on its own.

Steve looked up and counted to ten.

Okay, he just… he just needed to know where the bullet was. He just needed to know if it was in immediate danger of piercing one of his organs or if he… had time. To go to the hospital.

Yeah, the hospital for fugitives and ex-dead people.

Fuck.

He took out the pocket X-ray kit and slid the plate and film behind his back, and then held the X-ray gun towards his belly.

As he waited, he looked at the computer results, seeing that his set course would bring him, as promised, to Island 1. He could use autopilot from there to the Kordylewski cloud fringes, then manually manoeuvre, no problem. But then he would have to send a request for entry. He would have to manually dock in sector 1. Thank god getting a pilot’s licence was mandatory when he entered the detective academy.

Maybe he shouldn’t use his shipping code though, what with being on the run. Also with the being dead thing.

The X-ray gun beeped, and Steve swallowed hard. He leant forward and grabbed the plate behind him, unfolded it, and looked at the film.

It didn’t have the best resolution and didn’t show much outside of the small region around his wound. The apparatus was just there for self-administered emergency medicine on long trips taken alone. This wasn’t a hospital.

Still, he could clearly see the bullet. Or what was left of it. Its white silhouette looked half as long as he would have expected from a weapon of that calibre, not that he was any expert in weapons. It looked… smeared, almost dissolved, not that far from his kidney. More worrying were the stringy patterns, like nerve endings, snaking from a white shape that he was intimate with. A shape not unlike one of the vertebras of his spine brace. So that was why he couldn’t manage to get it off? Had his implant really fused to his body?

“Son of a fuck.”

He tidied up, simply for the fact that it helped him stop thinking about implants fusing with him; he put the X-ray gun in its case and let the film float around, a black-and-white picture suspended in the air. He pushed the button to open communications to the station.

“James Barnes, 32557038, request for docking to Sector 1, ship class F carrier TT4X.” His voice didn’t waver.

His hands, though…

“TT4X, this is Island 1 Sector 1 Spaceport, please hold. Over.”

“Island 1, copy. Over.”

Steve looked down at his belly, where the wound was still very sluggishly bleeding, but also healing itself, moving. It looked like something was moving under his skin. He felt faint…

“TT4X, this is Island 1 Sector 1 Spaceport, docking area U, fourth dock. Over and out.”

“Island 1, copy, Over and out.”

He gulped, and looked up into the cockpit, listening to the hissing and static of his newfound senses.

Fuck, Bucky was going to kill him.

Maybe hug him first and then chuck him into the Sun.

Steve fought back the urge to vomit as he felt his skin crawl in a very literal sense around his wound.

Staring out into the black of space, he felt his heart rate accelerate. He engaged autopilot and went to the sleeping bag hanging inside the sleeping closet, hiding from the wide expanse of nothingness.

He just wanted to go home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About this chapter...
> 
> The military in this fic aren't "the good guys" (for all that the concept of good guys exists), and thus, act accordingly, which is to say, badly. I did try to show the contrast between Steve and Bucky, doing whatever it takes to find each other, or solve their investigations sometimes at their own expense, but never crossing the line, whereas the bad guys have the same mindset, but their whatever it takes means "even if it's against a social contract", even if others get hurt.
> 
> Also, the feeling of confusion of the beginning and some sentences in the last chapter have been heavily inspired from ex long-term comatose people's testimonies, and my own esxperience when I keel over at the sight of blood :p.


	7. Fatigue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Bucky tries everything to find out what Lukin's plan is and goes down the rabbithole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feeling depressed? Do not try to cure it with uncovering a conspiracy. It only works in fiction.
> 
> Warning for: A cliffhanger. Also Rumlow being exactly why we can't have nice things. Why does police not work in "our timeline"? Not (only) because there are some truly racists bastards out for blood, but also because the force is made up of Rumlows.

### Part II, Chapter 7: Fatigue

In materials science, fatigue is the weakening of a material caused by cyclic loading that results in progressive and localised structural damage and the growth of cracks. Once a fatigue crack has initiated, each loading cycle will grow the crack a small amount, typically producing striations on some parts of the fracture surface. The crack will continue to grow until it reaches a critical size, […] producing rapid propagation and typically complete fracture of the structure.

`― Wikipedia, “Fatigue”`

Q: “So, Miranda, I hear you have just come back from your “Building A Future Society” TED Talk tour in Space, how would you describe it there?”

A: “Well, it sure is an experience. It is very uncanny, how similar their day-to-day life is to ours on Earth, but how different everything works, there.”

Q: “Found some inspiration for your next book?”

A: “Oh, studying Spacer society is nothing new, but seeing it for my own eyes was something else… I guess you could say that the Islands’ spaceport might be the closest thing to an anarcho-communist state since the Kowloon Walled City. Without the Triad rule, of course. It is one thing to think about cyberpunk as a social construct and another to experience it for real.”

Q: “Cyberpunk? Anarchy? That sounds… a tad bit out there. Do you mean to say that… the Space government doesn’t handle its population?”

A: “Oh, I wouldn’t say so, Christopher. Anarchy isn’t the absence of rules or government, it is the absence of a centralised government. The colony administration is actually extremely complex and heavily influenced by the anarchist philosophy of freedom of association and communal distribution. They decided pretty early on — which angered Earth to no end, mind you — to exert only the lightest of rule over dock space and spaceport districts. Patrols and policing only consist of check-ups. City planning is reduced to yearly safety checks on unconstrained construction work done by local communities. Trade unionism is actually pretty strong in the Island 1 spaceport, which means that after administrative taxes, which are actually very high, most of the money goes back into the community. Housing is regimented everywhere in the colony, except in this part, where apartment blocks belong to different communes…”

Q: “Communes?”

A: “Yes. Common property for a community of people. Private property abolished. You know. Collectivism.”

`― New Zealand TV, “A Trip to Space: Interview with Miranda Dell”`

No sooner had Bucky been brought back onto Lukin’s team than he’d been assigned to tag along on Rumlow’s missions. It had been years since Bucky had been in Vice, and he had forgotten how nonsensical Lukin’s assignments could be. To make matters worse, Rumlow had been in a sunny mood ever since he’d picked Bucky up in front of Phillips’ office on Monday.

When they entered the spaceport district, Rumlow made a beeline for the nearest street food stall. Bucky sighed. As much as he had felt that Phillips was coddling him, now he thought that Lukin was hazing him. Why the fuck else would he have to be babysat by Rumlow?

“Rumlow, weren’t we supposed to make the rounds?”

Rumlow shrugged his bulky shoulders, scarfing down a carton of braised wontons.

Bucky’s phone pinged just as he was getting ready to deliver his own snarky version of the detective code of conduct and ethical rules.

 _You keep him,_ the message said.

Bucky frowned; he had texted Becca earlier about when she’d take Alpine.

_Why?_

_You’re depressed, Bucket. You need Alpine more than me._

Bucky gritted his teeth and got ready to exercise his snark on his sister instead of his brand-new partner, but said partner slapped his shoulder.

“What?” Bucky asked testily.

Rumlow only raised an eyebrow. “Chill, dude.” He jerked his thumb towards the street. “You ready?”

Bucky harrumphed and pocketed his phone. Whatever, he’d keep Alpine. “Let’s go.”

They walked into the first brothel that had been marked for check-up. Bucky stood back, letting Rumlow take point. He had never been involved in those check-ups, which required way more networking than he had been capable of when he’d started his career. Now, he could see how Rumlow was seen around here; people knew him, and some were friendly while others were much colder in the face of his brawn and bravado.

The whole process was rather interesting, in a way. A lot of paperwork was involved in managing a house like this one. Health, construction, accounts, it all needed to be checked, and if found lacking, appointments needed to be made by Rumlow. Madame Romanova was to-the-point and professional, inviting them into her clean and tidy office, where she had stacked a paperback ledger marked ‘Inventory,’ a tablet and several memory sticks. They perused the data, checking that the accounts were in line with official declarations and no flags had been raised by some administration or another. They reviewed each worker’s bimonthly medical check-ups. Were wages duly paid? Had health inspectors been able to check all toys and appliances, too?

When Rumlow said that he now needed to interrogate some of the club workers, Madame Romanova nodded dutifully and asked that they follow her. Rumlow gestured at Bucky to stay in the office and continue reviewing the paperwork.

Fucking asshat.

Bucky huffed and watched Madame Romanova’s retreating back as she disappeared behind the door that opened into the changing rooms. He went back to his painstaking examination of job transfers. All the stores of patience he’d once had for paperwork and red tape had evaporated somehow, someway, someday.

His phone pinged again and he growled in annoyance. If this was Becca pestering him again about depression and anxiety, he swore he was going to blow a gasket.

It was an email from the lab about what he’d found on the platform in Liminal Space.

Dumping Romanova’s tablet and ledger on the desk, he went to the door, checked that no one was coming, and immediately opened the report and scrolled to the good parts.

Blood type A-. Deficiency in vitamin B12. Also contained the amounts of lithium usually associated with someone who had been implanted several times. And the best of the best: the bloodwork had been matched to someone.

Matched to Frank Castle.

Bucky poked around. Frank Castle, arrested for burglary along with one repeat offender, Wade Wilson. Bucky skimmed over the last arrest report, which recounted how they had been bagged by Gabe Jones as they were literally engaged in a screaming match in the middle of the burgled home.

Seriously?

When had Castle even been released?

Bucky looked out the door and checked that no one was coming this way. Going back to his sleuthing, he logged into the arrest and jail records. Searching for “Castle” got him two jail times, one much too old to be of interest, the last one showed a release date…

The nineteenth of April. 10:54 p.m.

The night before they went into Liminal Space.

Bucky thought he’d lost his hearing for some time, but it was only that his ears were ringing with rage, the same rage that had him staring blankly at the release form.

His nostrils flared, and he very purposely breathed in slow, even breaths, eyes closed. He needed to calm down.

He looked at the release form again.

There was something very wrong with it, something to do with a pending trial date that hadn’t been correctly annotated on the form. It looked like Castle had no trial pending. As if the form hadn’t gone through the channels of the Justice admin.

Bucky went back to jail releases, searched for Wilson, found a bunch of people named Wilson, but only one guy had been jailed during the period he wanted. Bucky braced himself for the anger that he knew would come back.

Comparing the two release forms showed the same fudging in the same locations.

And the same officer had signed on it.

Jack Rollins.

There were rats in the fucking house.

The red haze that had descended on his vision took some time to clear. A noise in the hallway pulled Bucky out of his white-hot anger. He turned his tablet off and looked up, but saw nothing. He put his tablet in his satchel and moved towards the door, checking that nobody was around. Then, at the end of the hallway, he saw Rumlow coming back with Madame Romanova in tow.

He quickly slipped back into the office and affected the posture of a guy who was tidying up the last of the paperwork and not that of a very vexed man who had only just found out in which direction his crusade should be headed.

“As usual, very nice of you to come by, Officer,” he heard Romanova say smoothly to Rumlow.

“Yeah, Natasha, always a pleasure, girl.” They both reached the door and Rumlow stopped, snapping his fingers. “Oh, is the neon paint show still on Wednesday?”

Bucky raised his gaze slightly and saw Romanova’s long-suffering air. She looked as if she was used to this and was humouring the guy. “Yes, Brock,” she huffed. “What is it? If it is about Lola, she’s still not doing one-on-ones, and if you ask me again, I’ll offer you a spanking so that you remember next time.”

“Damn,” he smiled easily. “Okay, girly, I won’t ask again. Book me a seat, though! You know I’m always in for some asses and light shows.”

Romanova scoffed, didn’t deign to answer Rumlow, and turned to Bucky. “Are you done?” She gave him the kind of stare only mothers and dominatrixes could give. He felt ten centimetres tall, and as if he were intruding.

“Yes. Yes, I am. Sorry, Madame.”

She half smiled, her eyes crinkling oh so slightly. “Cute. Nice partner you got there, Rumlow.” She looked at the both of them and gestured towards the door to her office. “Off you go then, officers. Brock, I guess I’ll see you Wednesday.”

“You got it.” Rumlow and Bucky exited the brothel in an orderly manner, Brock waving goodbye to some people he seemed to know.

Holy hell, did Rumlow live here, or what? It looked like he haunted the place.

Then again, it _was_ his job to bond and help the communities around these parts.

When they got back to the street, they had to jostle some of the pedestrians just to walk down to the next place they needed to check. Everything was noisy, people and buildings lit up by blinking green and blue neons. The morning wore on like this, and Bucky thought that it would never end. It really seemed like Brock haunted the spaceport district, stopping at every fucking stall to chat, knowing all the Madames and Monsieurs managing brothels and sex clubs by name, all the small-time manufacturers, repair shop owners and food stalls workers.

This was a side of Brock that he’d never had occasion to know, and it left a weird taste in Bucky’s mouth.

As the lunch hour had now passed, Rumlow brought them to a food stand he claimed was “so good you won’t believe it. The best damn nakji-bokkeum you’ll ever get.”

Bucky didn’t even try to tell Rumlow that to get octopi, the guy must have imported them illegally and would surely be breeding them in a bathroom aquarium. When in the docks, do as the dockers.

Brock was inhaling his spicy octopus stir-fry like a starving man, undeterred by the metric ton of gochujang spicing the dish. Bucky felt like he was holding a hand-sized piece of lava in a carton.

“Rumlow.” Bucky stared at his meal, picking through it with his chopsticks.

“Hmf?”

Bucky rolled his eyes and looked at him. Funny how Steve eating disgustingly had been… disgusting, but okay. And Rumlow doing so was disgusting, but annoying.

“Why did Lukin partner me with you? You look like you’ve got this.” _Let’s go at it in a roundabout way._

Brock rubbed his mouth clean with the back of his hand and then sucked on his chopsticks — was his stomach lead-lined, or what? “I don’t know. Maybe he thinks I would make a good mother figure, haha!” He turned to the food stall, asking for seconds, before turning back to Bucky to answer him. “Lukin is a cryptic ass, and there isn’t a lotta choice in Vice. We’re all overworked, you see how much work this is. I needed a partner, and when the boss said he wanted you back in, I don’t know, I just asked, man. He said yes and I didn’t question it. Gift horses and all that.”

This was… unexpected to say the least. “You asked? I mean. We don’t really…”

“Barnes, we don’t need to like each other to do our jobs. I don’t know why Lukin wanted you, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Also, most of us have solo assignments and the rest… I mean, you really wouldn’t gel with Ward or Rollins or Schmidt, man.” He snorted and grabbed his seconds as they were served. “Put this on my tab, Jeong-Ho!”

Perfect opening. Bucky cast his line and began fishing for real. “Ward and Schmidt were paired up temporarily? What the hell are the others doing, are you alone in this district or what?”

“Oh, yeah, they got paired up. Something about a transhumanist network here? Dude, I don’t even know, I tune Lukin out everytime he climbs onto his soapbox. I deal with keeping up with the unions and communes, they do their own thing.”

“Their own thing?”

“Ha!” Rumlow non-answered and hoovered up half of his nakji-bokkeum while Bucky was painstakingly rubbing off some of the excess gochujang on his sticky rice.

Maybe he should fish around some more. “I noticed Rollins didn’t have a partner, though.”

“Yeah, no, like I said, you wouldn’t gel with him, he’s kind of an asshole and a total brown noser.” Rumlow gobbled a piece of octopus. “You’re too much of a goody-two-shoes and Jack likes to cut corners everywhere he sees fit. I don’t want to get assigned yet another cop death. I’m in Vice, not Violent Crimes, haha.”

 _Yeah, haha._ “… Are you telling me he’s crooked?”

Rumlow frowned and pointed his chopsticks at Bucky. “See, that’s why Lukin wouldn’t pair you up with Jack.” He picked up his last piece of octopus. “Not saying he’s a saint, he’s a fucking piece of shit, but still.”

But still. But still, when Brock Rumlow, chief officer of “ethics is just a word,” considered someone to be a nasty…

“You gonna finish that?” Rumlow asked, mouth full, eyeing Bucky’s meal.

_Rats in the house._

“No, take it, I’m not hungry, anyway.”

* * *

How does one go about investigating a crooked cop?

Yeah, “cop,” because at this point, Bucky wasn’t above using derogatory terms to think about Rollins.

That night, Bucky decided that bread, butter and jam would make a good meal. The weather was getting hotter now that they were in the second half of June, so he had no desire for complicated or hot meals. And nobody was here to judge him, anyway, in his new one-bedroom flat packed full of unopened cardboard boxes. The cheery smiley face on the side of the boxes asking him to “please reuse and recycle me!” was staring at him from all over his living room.

Instead of unpacking, Bucky had turned all the boxes slightly so that the smiley would stop looking at him. Smiling people could eat his ass.

He phoned Odinson’s home and listened to his call ringing unanswered. He’d been calling every day, twice a day, to no avail. He couldn’t send any requests for information on the man for fear of having SAF break down his door.

With Laufeyson’s CWU, filed by VCU, still up in the air, the whole Ahmed case was at a standstill.

The request for lab work had been sent right before his transfer so that Lukin wouldn’t be able to find out what he was doing. Bucky was using his personal computer to input everything he could gather on Rollins and what he had gleaned from the lab analyses on his samples. The fibres showed nothing interesting.

He had copied all the transfer documents and run some searches into the police and jail databases in an effort to check for other occurrences of Rollins springing people from jail for no reason whatsoever.

Bucky had been at it for hours now, cross-checking between forms and databases. He hated it.

He fucking hated it.

Alpine came meowing over to him, and Bucky threw himself back onto the couch cushions, feeling, not for the first time, like his sanity was fraying at the edges.

“Can you believe my next shrink appointment is in two days?”

Alpine put his paws on his chest and rubbed his head on Bucky’s unshaven chin. “Mrrow.”

“Yeah, I should tell her ‘mrrow’ when she finally gets around to asking me if I’m doing well.”

Alpine pawed at his face twice before pawing at Bucky’s shirt, trying to peer down the collar.

“The fuck are you doing Alpine.” Alpine achieved his pointless goal of shoving his head down Bucky’s collar. He played with the cat’s fluffy tail until it twitched wildly in front of his face and Alpine finally decided to stop spelunking down his shirt.

“Okay, off you go, you twat.” Bucky grabbed Alpine and set him on the bunched-up blanket he used as a cat bed.

He checked the time; no wonder he was tired, it was near midnight. So far, he’d accumulated a bunch of small bits of information, something that might look like a pattern if you squinted hard enough while looking at it from an angle.

First, there were the early releases. It didn't happen often — Bucky had had to go back four years in the databases, but there were definite traces of Rollins having had some people released with fudged authorisations and forms. Bucky still hadn’t found out how it could have gone on for so long. Maybe nobody had noticed because of the lengths of time between the occurrences. Or maybe someone else was covering for Rollins.

Then there were the weird affiliations that he nearly hadn’t caught, at first.

But, blessed be the gods of spreadsheets, about halfway through this drudgery, he had tried to get it to spit out some statistics on releases and counts of indictment, mistook one column for another, and found out that a lot of people were being registered as transhuman when they were processed.

And really, transhumanists were a very small, tightly-knit community contained to the port. Key words being: very small. Steve had drilled the statistics into his brain. No more than one percent of the colony declared themselves as part of that movement. Most of the colonists thought implants were very practical contraptions which solved some medical issues. Compared to the greater cyborg and prosthesis-wearing population, transhumanists were small potatoes. Only a reduced number of people were receptive to the whole humans-are-machines-are-humans school of thought that transhumanists preached.

Bucky yawned and felt something pop in his jaw — fucking ouch! Maybe he’d see clearly in the light of day. Maybe he would take a page out of Phillips’ book and decide _not_ to solve the whole case in one night.

Looking at Alpine all cosy on his blanket pile, Bucky sighed and smiled slightly, feeling bittersweet. He petted his short, fluffy white fur, eliciting a mix of purring and cat-like snoring before he got up to go sleep in his barely-used bedroom.

Maybe Becca was right.

Maybe he _was_ depressed.

Whatever.

* * *

What nobody told about conspiracies and investigating inhouse was how crazily paranoid it made you.

Three days after his transfer was made official, Bucky had finally gotten around to emptying his box of office stuff in his new office on the Vice floor. Inside, he’d found his old tablet satchel and… a tablet. The tablet Lukin had given him two months or so ago with the uncomfortably detailed list of persons of interests.

This was incriminating, but incriminating to what extent was still to be determined. He’d taken the satchel with him, intending to take it home, and finding it had made him antsy and suspicious of everyone around him, so much so that an hour later he was still extremely distracted.

Bucky barely listened to the address Lukin that insisted on giving every fucking morning, as if they were goose-stepping assholes at reveille. He was looking out the window, part of his mind fondly remembering Phillips’ short memos and to-the-point one-on-one talks. There were no bushes to be beaten around in Crimes.

On the contrary, they seemed to have all grown in Vice, where Lukin had gotten worse since Bucky had last been there, droning on about moral order and caseload pie charts — a perfect storm of sanctimonious discourse and corporate hell.

Bucky groaned as slide forty-one showed yet again some type of chart, complete with trend analysis curves about report triaging. Lukin shot him a dirty look. Bucky looked around. Some of the officers looked really into it, so maybe it was actually interesting and Bucky would have liked this little slide sesh in another life. Or maybe no one had a soul, here. Right next to him, Rumlow winked at Bucky, then turned his tablet to him.

_lie back and think of england_

Well, the guy could be funny when he applied himself.

Instead of thinking of England, though, Bucky thought that the next graph looked really weird. He raised his hand, like this was school and he was in the most soul-sucking lesson ever.

Lukin looked too surprised to be scandalised at the interruption and gestured at Bucky to please go ahead.

“How come our caseload with regard to illegal implant trafficking has gone down that much? I thought smuggling investigations made up most of Vice’s work but this… doesn’t look like it.”

Lukin looked at Bucky as if he was having a brain aneurysm right there on his carpet. Schmidt turned in his chair, showing his burnt and grotesquely deformed features. He shook his head slowly, tsked, then smiled one of those horrible smiles that had detectives everywhere begging him to stop being happy.

“Barnes…” Lukin tutted, “I’m sorry you have been so coddled in Phillips’ unit that you don’t recognise the necessity of prevention in at-risk and crime-prone populations instead of intervention that always happens too late.”

Wow, the condescension was way too high in this room. “But this isn’t about prevention, it’s about networks based on other colonies and dismantling—”

Lukin didn’t wait for his in-depth analysis of criminality and talked over him. “Fascinating, please, come to my office after the meeting is over so we can address this philosophical issue.” Turning back to his slide, he pointed at another graph. “As I was saying…”

Rumlow elbowed him in the ribs and whispered, aggravated, “You _had_ to open your trap! He’s going to be at it for _years_!”

Bucky didn’t answer and seethed silently on his creaky chair for the rest of the meeting. When it was finally over, Lukin snapped his fingers and pointed at Rumlow and Bucky, then at the door, so they both followed him dutifully into his office.

“I know it has been a few years since you’ve been part of this team, Barnes,” Lukin said when the door closed on their little impromptu meeting. He was looking out through his window, like the perfect portrait of the sage and thoughtful leader. “And I guess Phillips’ ways will forever be a mystery beyond my understanding. But here, we don’t use team meetings as a platform for discussion and technical nitpicking. Especially when said discussion pertains to well-known facts your average officer should know. Prevention above intervention!”

As Lukin talked, Bucky felt his eyebrows rise up his forehead of their own accord. He looked at Rumlow — who frowned and gestured with his head to focus on their commissioner and not him — right before Lukin whirled around dramatically.

“I knew that when you quit on us, you wouldn’t waste any time drinking Phillips’ kool-aid, what with your new partner’s _affiliations_.” Lukin actually used air quotes. Jesus Carl Sagan Christ. Bucky struggled not to let his jaw drop open in bewilderment.

“I just can’t fathom, after all that happened during the Ahmed investigation, and the very clear signs of transhuman involvement in your late partner’s death, why you’d still be trying to railroad our methods here, Barnes. We have to focus on the bigger picture, not… small time mod-hackers.”

Bucky felt some kind of face whiplash as his features shifted from dumbfounded to sceptical and then curious. Was Lukin redirecting the efforts of his unit from the usual trafficking to… Something to do with transhumanists? How did it tie in with all the people they tagged as transhumans when processed? What the fuck was this bigger picture discourse? Was it about the contents of the tablet that was currently burning a hole in his satchel?

This didn’t make a lot of sense.

Then again, maybe Bucky could turn Lukin’s obsession to his advantage. Because he still had to find Loki Laufeyson. With Odinson unreachable, Laufeyson had become his last tenuous lead, outside of the Bullpen’s own rat problem, which was also a problem he needed to solve.

“Commissioner, it _is_ difficult for me to see that bigger picture, as I haven’t been here for years.”

“Did you not even read the file I gave you?” He stared at Bucky accusingly. “You _did_ keep it, right?”

Bucky’s suspicion radar was going haywire. “About that network in the spaceport?”

Lukin waved his hand in his direction, like _see?_ “There you go.”

“Why hide this from the public, or from the rest of the Bullpen?”

Bucky felt Rumlow fidget beside him. He was used to Steve fidgeting for no reason other than letting out pent-up energy, but he wasn’t attuned to Brock and couldn’t guess at why he was shifting from foot to foot right now.

Lukin frowned. “That would be risking some of the evidence and contacts we have managed to obtain. We have to get this right, and to get it right, we need the most solid of cases. Hard evidence, first-hand accounts, incontestable testimonies. Those are all hard to come by, especially in a lawless area like segment one.” Most of segment one was covered by the spaceport district and the docks. Sure, it saw a lot of traffic, but to say it was lawless was a huge reach, in Bucky’s opinion.

And it looked like it was a bit of a reach for Rumlow, too. “Come on, chief, I do my rounds there, it’s not that bad.”

“Rumlow, I’m not talking about unregulated buildings and checking that a hooker didn’t catch syphilis in between one week and the next, I am talking colony-wide smuggling, political unrest. Those kinds of crimes don’t bother with law. And they require much more intel than simple ledger check-ups would provide.”

Bucky braced himself on reflex for Rumlow to blow up and defend his work, his cases, something. But the gasket wasn’t blown, and Rumlow immediately relented with a huff and hands raised in surrender.

Bucky realised that he had been prepared for a Steve-type of reaction.

“Commissioner, all the intel in this… network file you showed me. Does all this come from missions you’ve been assigning?” He felt like whatever show Lukin was running ran far deeper than a simple obsession, but he needed to get further than a gut feeling. Maybe… “Do we have intel on Loki Laufeyson? Someone must have been assigned to him.”

“We don’t. He wasn’t living in that segment back in April, and he has been extremely elusive ever since.”

There was a tense silence in the room. Rumlow turned to Bucky and whispered, “Barnes…”

“I could find him.”

Rumlow huffed and crossed his arms over his chest. Lukin smiled like a shark and looked far happier about Bucky’s suggestion than he would have expected. “You would, wouldn’t you? Anything for the case, right?” Bucky narrowed his eyes at the cryptic answer while Lukin just shifted over to his computer and clicked several times, smiling like Christmas had come early. “I see here that you still have an interview pending about the events of April twentieth. I also assume you know that one does not just walk into a transhumanist bar unadorned with implants.”

Right. Fuck. He’d need to get some implants, or fake ones that looked realistic enough to confuse potential targets. Bucky shivered at the thought but tried not to let his unease show too much.

“I know.” Beside him, Rumlow clucked his tongue in annoyance.

Whatever worked. He needed to understand what it was Steve had been after in Vice. And barring that, he needed to find Laufeyson, which required some resources that he didn’t have right now. Which required being on the ground, in the spaceport.

If only he could find the guy, maybe he would finally figure out why they had found themselves in Liminal Space. Maybe he’d find out where Odinson had fucked off to.

* * *

Bucky didn’t even have time to digest the “talk” with Lukin before Rumlow dragged him into the first available interrogation room. He shoved Bucky towards the perp chair — there was always one comfy chair and one death-trap chair that did screwy things to your spine, and only one of them was always reserved for perps — and took out his tablet and stylus.

“What? Are we doing this _now_?” Bucky asked with surprise.

“When else, dumbass? You just up and decided to go screw around in bullshit undercover work. You wanna wait, you can tell Lukin about how the delay wasn’t my fault.”

Brock sat down heavily in his chair and began tip-tapping on his tablet, his movements jerky and impatient.

“Are you… angry about something?”

Rumlow huffed a breath and looked up briefly from his tablet, which beeped. “You want us to talk about our feelings? I can braid your hair; you can tell me all about your feelings of abandonment and I’ll tell you all about my feelings of inadequacy.”

“You do realise that I didn’t get back into this unit just to go check clubs out?”

Rumlow let his tablet clatter down onto the table — good thing the police issued good protection covers — and looked Bucky dead in the eyes. “You do realise that I didn’t get you back into this unit because of your soulful blue eyes? You can go play right into Lukin’s hand, I don’t fucking care.” Bucky opened his mouth to retort something, but didn’t get the chance, as Rumlow immediately started the recorder. “Detective officer Brock Rumlow, ID 45025691, interrogation five in case 2165-78, death of detective officer Steve Rogers. For the record, please state your identity.”

Bucky leant over the table. “Detective officer James Barnes, ID 32557038,” he then very purposely tapped his finger on the recorder icon, under the baleful eyes of Rumlow. “And what hand is that?”

“I don’t know, Barnes.”

“How do you not know? This has been your unit for years.”

“Maybe you were too full of yourself in your younger days and never paid attention, but didn’t you notice how it’s either ‘be the teacher’s pet’ or ‘lay low and shut your mouth’ in this place?” Rumlow smiled like a shark. “Bet you didn’t pay any attention to that, huh? Sighing after your boyfriend stuck in Carter’s unit.”

Brock tapped the icon, and Bucky tapped it again. “You think you can distract me with taunts about Steve, think again, asshole. What’s Lukins’ deal? Is Rollins one of the teacher’s pets or just crooked? What’s _your_ deal?”

“I don’t fucking know, Barnes, I told you already, do you want me to sing it softly in your ear? Just know that when Lukin asked me to bring you in, I knew he had something brewing. But guess what? I’m not Rollins. And I’m not you. I don’t like smelling shit, so when someone’s taking a crap under my nose, I go the fuck home and mind my own business.” He tapped the icon. “Officer Barnes, why were you in Liminal Space on April twentieth in the middle of the night?”

Bucky sat back in his chair. “We were following a lead given by a soldier.”

“Who?”

“Thor Odinson.”

“Did you expect any kind of resistance going there?”

“We didn’t know what to expect, but SAF presence made us cautious, so we requested defensive weapons and space suits because there had already been some people hurt by a toxic substance that we suspected might be found at the scene. We brought the usual gear and body-cams, even though those would have had some problems catching anything with how dark it is under there.”

Bucky looked on as Rumlow jotted some words down.

“Who did you see there?”

“Two SAF soldiers. Rank unknown.”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ammunition casings were found on site, who fired?”

“A third party and SAF soldiers.”

“Were you, or Rogers, in possession of illegal weapons or any subset of firearms in direct contradiction with colony weapon regulation laws?”

“No.”

“Did Rogers take aim at someone?”

“I don’t know… No.”

“No or I don’t know?

“No.”

“And did you?”

“No.”

“You fought someone.”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. They caught me from behind.”

“How could they catch you from behind if you had been standing in the same place for a while? They’d have had to come from somewhere.”

“We had to move to reach the figure Steve was running at.”

“Hmhmm.”

It went on like this for some time. He had promised Rumlow that he would be compliant and answer all his questions, so he did. Most of his answers were variations of “I don’t know.” Rumlow was quite thorough, and tried several avenues several times to get his answers, maybe to catch him in a lie, or to be sure that Bucky really didn’t know anything about the assailants. He focused a lot on the guns and the elusive third-party suspects who had been hiding in the rafters. It was slow going and took most of the morning, and some of the afternoon, too, after a short respite that Bucky spent eating outside alone to get some fresh air. For a lazy cop, Rumlow sure knew how to be careful and comprehensive in his questions. Maybe Bucky had been wrong about him all along. Not wrong about him, but wrong about his work. He still was a piece of shit who’d feel proud of himself for not breaking out the popcorn while watching someone catch on fire.

Then again, maybe he was only doing it to wear on Bucky’s nerves, and all the energy he was expending right now would mean balancing this with months of eating Spacer-Korean food in the spaceport while chatting up Madames and doing exactly zero investigative work. Where was the “seek truth” here? When had Vice lost its damned collective mind?

The whole ordeal had been so tiring he ended up making his way to the Archives floor; on the way there, he crossed paths with Phillips in the corridors and his old chief nodded as if this were any other day.

Once there, Bucky sat heavily in a chair, letting the droning noise of the banks of computers drown his thoughts. He searched aimlessly for a while and ended up clicking randomly on one of Steve’s archived voice reports. Something banal, about a fight they had de-escalated. He listened to his friend’s voice to try and escape the feeling of having painted himself into a corner.

* * *

The fact that Lukin’s barely-disguised satisfaction carried over through the weekend was what cemented Bucky’s conviction that he’d done the right thing. Or had at least gone in the right direction. For all that Aleksander Lukin was one step removed from a moustache-twirling villain in Bucky’s eyes, his plans stayed pretty obscure. Bucky figured he had no choice but to dig in further.

Even if that meant getting burnt in the process.

Someone had to, right? Someone had to sacrifice themselves. Not like he had much to lose.

 _Seek the truth_. Well, here was something to uncover, something he could do besides spin his wheels endlessly on a cold case, he realised on this fine… Monday, twenty-fourth of June. My, how time went by when you didn’t much care about anything aside from work and… things.

He hadn’t really slept well the night before. Never did, anymore.

He went through the motions. Got the cold shoulder all day from Rumlow while they did their rounds in the spaceport. The only silver lining was that they had to wear mandatory air masks all day unless they were eating — the district saw so much transit that the colony recommended protection against possible airborne diseases. Nobody wanted a disease outbreak spreading all over space stations and under dome habitats so most people were masked in one way or another. Rumlow’s constant sneering disappointment was mostly hidden behind the mask.

He came back home, he hugged his cat, he answered the call for his shrink appointment the next day.

Bucky slept fitfully, woke up at dawn, looked in the mirror, did nothing to his hair, forfeited breakfast because it was just too much work, and then tagged along with a pissed off Rumlow all through the spaceport.

“Why the fuck are you so angry about this?” He asked at some point, as they ate at yet another street food stall Rumlow seemed to know the owner of, as well as all his family.

“Is it hair braiding hour again?”

Bucky sighed, and nibbled at his dumpling.

“I fucking had a partner for one single hot second and you went and spoiled that for me. That’s why.” Rumlow mumbled into his meal, eating like a pig and not giving a shit. “Sure as shit not gonna be a happy camper about it.”

Well…

That effectively shut Bucky up for the day.

Go back to the Bullpen, go home, clean flat, pet cat, greet Claire, smile.

“Bucky, I see you managed to tidy up! That’s good.”

 _Yeah, shlepped all the boxes over to Becca’s so as not to have any reminder of Steve in here._ “Went to see my sister to sort through them. There’s a lot less space here. And it helped say goodbye.”

Claire had looked sceptical, until his last sentence. Maybe that was his problem, here: too good at lying, made it too easy to play the system.

_Wait._

Claire had been asking something while Bucky pondered his situation, so he cut her off in the middle of her question. “You never did approve of my returning to work, huh?”

Claire tilted her head, quizzical, and raised her eyebrows. “I did, actually, I thought it would give you something to do and make you less… aimless.”

“How much say do you have in what kind of work I’m authorised to take on?”

“Each admin is pretty independent, as you know, but Medical’s decisions take precedence over detective units. Over the whole Lost and Found, actually.”

“I told you about my transfer, right?”

“You did.” She sighed. “I’m willing to understand your motivations and I haven’t stalled anything because I was assured by your new commissioner that you’d be working paired up with a partner, engaging in social contacts and physical activity. Dock patrols. I believe this would do you a world of good if you let it. You… deteriorated fast while you were ‘chained to your desk,’ as you put it yourself.”

Bucky nodded. “Want coffee?”

No one could fault Claire Temple for being able to roll with subject changes. They made idle chitchat as he prepared some chocolate for her, some coffee for himself. She humoured him, waited him out.

“What if I needed you to do something for me?”

“James.”

“Please, Claire.”

She sipped her chocolate in the ensuing silence; Bucky took this as a go.

“What if you received a request for me going into solo work. Active work. This would engage your responsibility, right? If you’d let me do it. Your name would appear somewhere.” There would be a trail, something incriminating, he didn’t say.

“I wouldn’t do that. Actually, nobody in Medical would do that. That would be the best way to end up on a mining operation counting grains of regolith faster than you could say malpractice.”

“Good.” That meant that whatever Lukin had planned, he’d stay paired up, or Lukin had a way of obfuscating Bucky’s… job changes. Hiding what was going on in his unit from other Admins.

Claire looked at him suspiciously. He’d been too vague or he’d let it go much too soon; either way, he had to evade, so he smiled deprecatingly, carefully curating his expression, half abashed, half tentative. “I had to ask, needed to know where the limits are.”

“It’s too soon for you to be on your own. You’re alone enough every day when you get back home. You are acutely depressed, anxious, and your PTSD lessened in intensity only recently. What you need is stability, activity and medication.”

He didn’t have much to say to that. She was right, on all those points. But he also wanted to do something significant in Steve’s memory, do something with himself. Healing wasn’t that high on his priority list.

They talked a bit more, and he used his complicated relationship with Rumlow as a smokescreen.

As the week wore on, Bucky got used to Rumlow giving him the cold shoulder. His old coworkers were a wary of his mood swings, and his new teammates all ranked on a sliding scale of indifferent to “I fucking hate that guy.” He sometimes felt like he had the plague.

Bucky took the time to actually put together a semblance of a file during his lonely evenings. He read Lukin’s tablet in depth and then he made an encrypted copy — nothing too fancy — and tagged it as VCU evidence with his old authorisation codes, leaving the case number blank. If he died, or disappeared, this would go to Phillips for review. Lukin had been so keen on Bucky having it that it made him wonder what the man had in store. What he wanted to do with Bucky.

Bucky compiled his own discoveries — Castle, Wilson, the older releases — his notes on the attitudes and stances of detectives in Vice. Nothing that would hold, but he needed to hand down some sort of a pattern to whoever would get the job if he had a… bad case of deathitis.

You didn’t send just anybody to root out traffickers, especially not a crime investigator half recovered from a mental breakdown. But Lukin wanted to do just that, and Bucky had no clue how to figure out what was afoot except by jumping into the shark-infested pool above which he had been walking a tightrope for days.

Friday couldn’t have come sooner, at this point. He and Rumlow were constantly butting heads about the most inane things. What directions to take, what shops to start with, what headers to use on their reports on Monday. Around five in the afternoon, Bucky thought he was close to decking the asshole on their way back to the Bullpen.

To cap off the day, he found a note from Rollins on his desk. Starting Tuesday, they’d be paired up and he’d get fitted with mods and gear, briefed.

So that was it.

That weekend felt strange. Even stranger than usual. Bucky had struggled ever since April with bursts of anger and stretches of numbness, feeling like he had no control over himself, over anything.

Sam came over on Saturday, which was a surprise, and quite frankly, Bucky didn’t know what to make of it, as untethered as he felt. He was on the brink of falling into a situation he had voluntarily chosen. He wanted to be left alone with his bad decisions. Sam Wilson must have had a bad decisions radar, though.

“Hey, Bucky.”

Bucky stayed in the doorway, eyeing Sam warily. “Hi, Sam.”

Sam raised an eyebrow and nodded towards the interior of the flat. Bucky sighed and let him come inside.

“So, I spoke to Becca.” Bucky groaned despairingly at that; Sam only continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Seems like you dropped about all the boxes you had there. Good thing she got her house in the Habitat lottery or else you’d have to ask for storage, hm? Then Claire would have heard about it and she might have asked questions, right?”

How come he was so transparent to Sam? How had he guessed about his crush on Steve, and now his half-assed plan to just get rid of everything from his old life?

“James. You may have fooled Rebecca because she feels she shouldn’t question anything lest she loses her brother. Maybe you fooled Claire, I don’t know, you can be an evasive shit when you want to. You didn’t fool me.” Bucky walked into the kitchen, avoiding Sam’s accusing glare. “What are you doing?”

“Would you believe me if I told you I’m avenging Steve?”

Sam scoffed, then relented and looked at Bucky directly, going as far as putting himself between Bucky and the fridge just to look him in the eye. “Avenge Steve?” Bucky forwent trying to get to his orange juice and stared blankly at Sam. “You’re serious, you are.”

Bucky refused to answer. The disbelief was plain in Sam’s voice, which was not unexpected. Bucky wasn’t too sure what he had been trying to do, telling Sam the truth. A cry for help?

Bucky went to the sink to get a glass of water. "James. Bucky.” He drank, ignoring Sam. “You're not fucking Batman, Barnes," Sam growled.

Bucky looked down at his empty glass, tilted and rolled it and watched as a drop of water slowly slid to one side, then another. “Did you know Steve had taken a case investigating another unit?” Sam crossed his arms in a forbidding stance, which was answer enough. “Sam, that’s all I’ve got left. Steve’s unfinished business.”

“And when that business gets finished, what are you going to do? You’ll be just as miserable as you are now, but you’ll be idle and your sense of what’s worth living for will be even more screwed up than it is now. Bucky—” Bucky delicately put the glass in the sink, still unwilling to look at Sam in the eyes. “Bucky, please. You’re just running from your feelings. Please try harder to hold on to the present.”

“Okay, I promise I’ll try.” Sam would not be satisfied with anything less than a promise, and Bucky felt a sudden pang of longing for all those times Steve had promised to take care of himself better. The intent had been different then, but the promises just as empty.

As Bucky walked Sam back to the door, Sam gave him a one-armed hug and whispered fiercely, “You would do well to remember that you’re the only thing I have left of Steve’s, you son of a bitch..”

Dang.

Trust Sam Wilson to never mince words and deliver lethal parting shots.

On Sunday, Bucky finished compiling the potential leads he was going to explore with regard to this rat problem the detective headquarters seemed to have. How rampant was the bias against transhumanists? If Lukin intended to use Bucky, what colony administrations would the man have to fool?

He had been moored to his desk all day Monday filling in reports with Rumlow about their patrols when it occurred to him that it might be the right time to send a smoke signal about the current state of affairs to Phillips. How, was another question entirely. Bucky was absolutely sure that the walls had ears and that his heart-to-heart with Rumlow had only happened because Brock was an old hand at dodging his teammates' curious ears.

He sat down to write a message, on paper, with a real pen, and then took a break and went down to Crimes. He saw Dugan in the office and he went over and asked quietly for a biscuit. Dugan looked cautious but hopeful, making Bucky realise how much his old coworkers… cared. Had cared. Still cared. Bucky tried for a reassuring smile as he took the biscuit, and left the message in the pack in its place.

“Take it to Phillips. No one must see, no one must know,” he whispered to Dugan. Timothy — bless his soul — didn’t even bat an eye, and shook the pack under Bucky’s nose, as per usual. Bucky said no, as was the new normal.

_Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. I think I’m the fuse they intend to melt. Get in touch with Sam Wilson and Claire Temple if something goes wrong. They’ll want closure._

* * *

The day he got his official assignment for undercover work, Bucky woke up with a jerk on his mattress, which was still lying on the floor. He had dreamt of walking down the street with Becca. He had told her how important she was to him, and she’d said the same. Then, he’d turned around and she was nowhere to be found.

He buried his face in Alpine’s fur and put his ear to the cat’s body to listen to him purr like a wind turbine. He cried. Then he sniffled and booped Alpine on the nose.

He was fine.

He fed his cat and he fed himself with toast or something. He got dressed. His old routine with Steve had taken an hour, at the very least. But his wake-up hour hadn’t changed, and his routine now consisted of “trying to look human enough,” which expended very little time, and hence made him stupidly early to work.

He loitered around waiting for his dumbass new-soon-to-be-old partner. He went to the archives, selected another report at random and listened to Steve’s voice.

To Bucky’s dismay, it was Rollins who came to tell him the assignment had been set up. Sure, he was actually trying to suss out Jack’s deal, but that didn’t mean he had to appreciate being in his close proximity.

The actual fitting of his fake implants began around eight, when the equipment guy — Georges Batroc he was called, a grating brawny guy with a slight French accent — came into work. It was all oddly dispassionate, simple. They chose from an array of duds that had been real implants but were now deactivated. He started off feeling somewhat put off by the display, hating the idea of having a foreign body implanted inside him. That sensation, however, faded away after a while. He looked at himself looking at the implants and duds, dithering over them, detached, unconcerned.

He chose some metallic patches for his cheekbones like your regular jock douchebag was wont to get. Some flashy pieces like a small neon-printed circuit board that acted like a watch patched onto the skin. Lenses that made his eye colour more vivid, and implants that were actually useful on each of his temples that could record what he saw with a link to those fancy lenses.

Gadget-level mods.

Then he needed to get some of the more invasive ones. Lukin seemed to have made a list. Bucky looked it over, and nothing seemed over the top or too out there. He’d expected Lukin, with his paranoid visions of hordes of cyborgs invading the streets, to go for flashy and complex prostheses. But those were all surveillance implants, like sensors, cams, and slight enhancements like optical overlays, morphing fingerprints.

Even the blackbox looked normal, here. He’d need some sort of backup for all that data anyway, right?

He signed off on the list, but even in his marginally disassociated state he couldn’t miss the hungry look on Lukin’s face as he grabbed the signed document.

He spent his afternoon and the day after in surgery, and when he came back home, he looked at himself in the mirror, at his ice-blue eyes made even icier. He poked the back of his neck, on the left side of his cervical vertebrae, where the skin was still tender around the blackbox port.

They’d told him when he woke up that he’d had basically no rejection side-effects.

He touched his reflection with the tips of his fingers, now with fingerprints that changed over time.

He felt a bit like this body wasn’t really his. But that was all right.

He was just the vessel, here to find who the fuck had killed the other half of his soul.

* * *

Jack Rollins was the one to help him settle into a nondescript flat in the spaceport. Nothing much, nothing more than a matchbox in a dingy building with only one window opening onto a hallway suspended above a street. They made sure he only moved essential stuff, nondescript stuff. Rollins wasn’t one to make chitchat.

The only thing that bothered Bucky was that he wasn’t using a mask. At his question, Rollins chortled, “After a week in the port, you’ll have caught everything under the sun. Either you’ll be dead or you’ll be immune.”

Which was a statement so incredibly ignorant that Bucky had nothing to counter it with except gaping at him.

Friday, twenty-eighth of June, 2165, the sixty-ninth day after Steve’s death. He was in Lukin’s office, Rollins posted by his side looking off into space like a robot standing by. Bucky bit his lip while Lukin was shuffling papers around, stacking two tablets together, sorting through a box of odds and ends.

This was it. There was no going back. He’d also finally get to see what Lukin was planning. He’d only be getting glimpses, he’d need to puzzle Lukin’s grand scheme out, of course, but no matter. Bucky would bide his time, watch, take notes, see what was what. What Lukin had brewing out there in the docks.

“Barnes. I’m glad you managed to see reason.” Lukin huffed a humourless laugh that Bucky didn’t get, and continued. “You will be assigned a list of transhumanists who are suspected of belonging to a violent cell trying to sow dissent in our colony. Amongst them is Loki Laufeyson, one of your targets. Particular assignments may be given to you on occasions, pertaining to this broader case that Vice is investigating.”

“Kobik?” Bucky inquired.

“It’s need to know,” Lukin replied testily. Bucky nodded. “Very good.” Lukin nodded, too, and smiled. He pushed a tablet across the table to Bucky. “Here you go, Barnes, you can sign here and here, triplicates. Those will activate your cover identity: Sergei Smerdyakov. You will be flagged as in recovery from a medical operation in the system. And this one document will put you under our own Privacy Blanket for undercover work. No busybodies to come and bother you with derogations, isn’t that great?”

Knowing how he and Steve had fought against the military’s Privacy Blanket in their time, signing the document felt like a very bittersweet vindication.

He signed everything. He looked at Lukin.

“Now what?”

“Now this.” Lukin slid the smallest of earpieces over to him and what looked like a small black non-standard-issue facemask.

“An earpiece?”

“Private comm link to undercover agents in the area, and a direct link to me.”

“And that?”

Lukin nudged the facemask. “Same as your regular filter mask, lightweight. Don’t wear it all the time, my advice is to get used to spaceport air slowly. Call it mithridatism, if you will.”

“Right.”

Bucky inhaled deeply. He’d spent the last few days in a haze of depersonalisation — Claire had worked hard with him to help him regain some sense of self, but it was hard. At least it had served as yet another diversion — but now, right this minute, he felt alive, and he felt scared. Because this was real, and he suspected he wouldn’t come back from it.

But then again, what was there to come back to?

He picked up the mask and fitted it over his mouth and nose. It was strangely comfortable. He could see himself indistinctly in the reflection of the blackout window behind Lukin.

He looked a bit weird.

A bit badass.

He smiled, which crinkled his eyes, but not much else could be seen on his half-obscured face.

“Okay, then.” He nodded at Lukin again and put the earpiece in his ear. Lukin smiled and slid a piece of paper over to Bucky.

And then he said, “Your new orders.”

* * *

_New orders._

There was a reflection of a man in the blacked-out window.

Someone was sitting in front of him. “Agent. Report.”

“ **R** eady **T** o **C** omply.”


	8. Escape Velocity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein the parallel lines of Bucky's and Steve's journey finally converge, and a new protagonist takes over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is HUGE, like it clocks at 14372 words in my word processor. This warrants its own warning.
> 
> Jehans made a mindblowing sound effect here that you absolutely **must** listen to. It's the colony's song, as Steve hears it (more about that in the story *wink wink nudge nudge*)
> 
> Warnings for some kind of split identity thing, blanket Winter Soldier fuckery.
> 
> The dialogue in Russian between Pietro and (spoiler alert) Bucky's alter, Sergei, has been translated from English by [need more meta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/need_more_meta), who has been kindly providing language analysis, and on point rants about the vague Russian-ish of the MCU and how it is, in fact, not real Russian. I love that fandom is never _just_ about "making this OTP kiss" but also about the meta and the dissertations on media, and NMM has contributed to this side of fandom in the best of ways. Thank you bichette ✨ you're a doll.
> 
> Russian is written in cyrillic, so transliterations and translations are in hovertext and will be listed in the endnotes.
> 
> I have tried to put anchors in the text so you can stop at three different places in the text, hopefully it'll work. Spoiler alert:
> 
>   * This will bring you to Steve's adventures in space
>   * This will bring you to Steve reaching Sam
>   * This will bring you to the honeypot situation
> 


### Part II, Chapter 8: Escape velocity

In physics (specifically, celestial mechanics), escape velocity is the minimum speed needed for a free, non-propelled object to escape from the gravitational influence of a massive body, that is, to achieve an infinite distance from it. Escape velocity is a function of the mass of the body and distance to the center of mass of the body.

`― Wikipedia, “Escape velocity”`

A **blackbox** is a subcutaneous implant situated in the occipital region to back up data.[13] If the data is retrieved and backed up, it can cover a variety of input flux, such as, but not limited to: implant electrical consumption, heat dispersion, bodily function cycles, nutritional intake, sleep cycles, etc.[5][13][14] Retrieval of data is done using various means, and depends on the model of blackbox used. External drives, specific wires, or optical fibre nano-Avim connectors are the most frequently used links[citation needed]. The cost of a blackbox varies from one to five times the standard Ceres monthly salary, depending on the model.

 **Darkboxing** is the practice of hacking a native flashed software,[15] reflashing the native software,[4][5][15] or the physical rewiring of a blackbox.[16][17] This practice was made illegal in 2094 after a slew of criminal cases involving darkboxes that had left their recipients braindead or permanently disabled. Other victims were left with increased levels of neurodivergence and complex psychological issues.[1][15] Darkboxing stemmed from the desire to record dreams, as well as the much darker intent of “curing” neurodivergences, a school of thought which was in direct breach of the Spacer Hippocratic Oath. The research, led in secret,[2] enticed multiple victims with the ludic aspect of watching dreams, but in reality, preyed on neurodivergent populations. The people responsible were arrested by the newly-founded so-called “Unspeakable Files” branch of the Lost & Found, the ancestor to the Space Detective Vice Unit. In the absence of a carceral system in Space, the perpetrators were sentenced to never set foot in a laboratory, and to work for the rest of their life in solitary manual labour, where they would be unlikely to affect other people’s wellbeing.[15][16][17][8]

Victims of darkboxing suffer from a cohort of physical and psychological problems, amongst which the most prevalent are: derealisation, dissociative identities and various types of dissociative syndromes, catatonic states, and hemiplegia. With time, most of the victims manage to significantly reduce the manifestations of these problems and recover control of their mind.[4][8]

The **spookybox** is an urban legend,[6] [better source needed] born from the darkbox practice. In urban legends about spookyboxes, some of the implants used for darkboxing are passed on from person to person, carrying part of the former implanted soul with them into the newly-implanted person.[10] One legend has it[tone] that one of the spookyboxes was a “haunted” hacked blackbox belonging to a station window maintenance crewman who had been killed by an assailant to get his blackbox. His soul stayed within the implant, wanting vengeance, and had pushed his assailant to cut the implant out of himself, which led to his death. The spookybox was then passed on, and each newly recipient went on to die a gruesome death.[6] There is no proof of the existence of such a black/darkbox.[18][5][19]

`― Wikimedia Foundation, “List of Cybernetic Prosthetics”`

The mission looked straightforward enough to Bucky. All in all, the whole affair with Lukin giving him his assignment had been pretty weird, but nothing unexpected. While Lukin was passing him the last of his gear, Rollins had disappeared from the room without Bucky even noticing, but Lukin had told him that he had gone to finish preparing the flat Bucky had been moved to.

His cover identity would be one Sergei “Seryozha” Smerdyakov, Russian citizen emigrated to Ceres and then to the Islands. He was a drifter, really. He had worked for a year as a low-level government employee in Saint Petersburg after a stint in the Russian army. He’d then gone on to become a mining operation supervisor on Ceres. He’d stayed there for the standard three years until he’d been moved to a higher-gravity colony by Population Control — everyone on a low-gravity colony was sent for a stretch of time to a half-g or higher colony to prevent bone decay and premature arthritis. He would begin his first night as a bartender soon.

The whole file compiled as background on his cover was astonishingly deep and well researched, which made his detective antennae wiggle and tingle.

Overall Bucky had felt… uneasy, during this discussion with Lukin. He had been distracted, and he felt like he had lost some time in there. He’d been absent in a way he wasn’t used to, even with his current poor state of mental health. Mostly, he was concerned about how he was going to be able to send the proof of wrongdoing he would amass in Lukin’s unit while undercover. Send how and to whom?

The medical proof he had been implanted with would help cover up for him when he dropped out of psychotherapy, dropped out of his usual, albeit very small, social circles. He recognised this for what it was: a way of cutting him off from any safety net he might have had, which cemented Bucky’s idea that Lukin’s planned to use him as a sacrificial lamb in one way or another. It was also a sign that Lukin had found the means to fudge files and administrative red tape, surely taking advantage of the complexities of paperwork and how slowly the administrative machine tended to respond when… stuff went off the rails.

So before he went to his cover flat, he placed one last call.

“Bucky?”

“Sam. I’m going to need a favour.”

The line stayed silent for some seconds before Sam asked cautiously, “What can I do?”

“I need you to get in contact with Commissioner Chester Phillips. Be discreet. He goes to Rolling Hills Park on Saturdays.”

“James, wha—“

“No, listen to me, I don’t have much time. I need you to ask him for an encrypted phone and for you to drop in at the Firth Union deposit box, intersect seven of the metalworking union quarter. If I fail to contact one of you three days in a row… file a CWU.”

“You are such an asshole, I can’t believe you—” Sam cut himself off and heaved a gusty breath. “Alright. Anything else?”

Bucky made one last round of his flat, which held no memories of anybody. It had just been a stopover between his life with Steve and whatever he was doing now. “Claire. Dr Temple. She’ll think I’ve been shifted to other caseworkers and physical therapists or something, I have no clue how that’s gonna happen. If she asks you questions, tell her I’m okay.”

“Are you?”

“Okay? As okay as I can be, considering.” Bucky took his keys, his notes, and Alpine, because he’d need all the comfort he could get and he couldn’t go over to Becca’s with all the implants he had. She would see and know that he didn’t need recovery and had zero rejection. “Listen, I’ve got to go.”

“You’re a fucking fool.”

“Bring the secure phone, I’ll check the deposit box as often as I can.”

Bucky clocked in on his first night as Sergei Smerdyakov, bartender, on a Saturday evening close to the end of June. He was introduced to Pietro Maximoff, who would share all his shifts. Pietro spent the next few nights showing Bucky the ropes; he cleaned tables and swept the floors when most of the docker and salvage worker patrons had emptied the premises. He was kept to easy tasks because bartending wasn’t that easy, and was actually quite physically draining. The bar in and of itself wasn’t that shady, just one of those typical bars where patrons only come for the moderately cheap menu, the permanently-low lighting, and the fine delicacy of not being bothered while they waited for the alert from the dock telling them that their tralphium refuel was done.

Bucky thanked his lucky stars that this wasn’t one of the trendy bars or one of the ones with a dance floor where you could be asked to cook up a complicated cocktail. This was a pure docker bar, open all day, all night, all week. After his first late shift, when he crashed back at home, he knew that his sleep schedule would be shot to shit for a while before it could right itself.

On Monday, the first of July, he finally received the secure phone. He’d decided to go check the deposit box right before his shift and had been delighted when he saw the small device waiting for him. Having learned their numbers by heart, he immediately sent a very short message to Sam and Phillips.

It was with no small amount of trepidation that Bucky was expecting his first orders to arrive. He had scoped out the district and kept tabs on several of the people who had been listed as “transhumanists.” To him, they weren’t much more than your average cyborg citizen, modded or prosthesised people who minded their own business. One didn’t even have implants, he just had to wear an exoskeleton during his work shifts because of the heavy lifting involved in working in the commercial docking bays.

On the bartending front, he was making progress, and was upgraded to serving beer on tap. Now, he always responded when Pietro called him Sergei, and had stopped fumbling and pouring too much foam on top of the beer he served by the end of his first week. So there was that, at least.

It was late on Thursday morning, around nine, as he speedwalked to his dingy flat after his shift at the bar. He was beat, having served beer for the whole night. He grabbed some livers from the local butcher. The shop looked a bit unsanitary, but people were lining up outside to get some food here so… when on Ceres.

Right as he arrived home,he looked at his phone and saw that he had just received an email. He also found Rollins, already there, seated at his little dining table, waiting.

Creepy. “Hey, Rollins. Come to give me a special assignment?”

Rollins looked blank for a second, then he blinked and grinned like a shark, “The boss said you patrolled with Rumlow?”

 _What does that have to do with anything?_ “Yeah, I did.” Bucky answered, cautiously.

“You know Romanova?”

Bucky nodded, still unsure of where this line fo questioning was heading to.

Rollins hummed, and looked lost in thought, “I liked her shows.”

What? Bucky slow-blinked at Rollins, “I… Pardon?”

Rollins lost his smile. “You have

_New orders._

— right as he arrived at home, he looked at his phone and saw that he had just received an email. He read it while preparing to go to sleep. The morning was already turning into midday and he felt tired as hell. But then he had to stop reading because he felt… spied on, so he went to close the blinds, weirded out by the feeling of being watched.

The email contained a list of persons of interest he’d need to keep tabs on. It was much shorter than the long list of people compiled on the tablet. On top of the list was none other than Loki Laufeyson. Bucky wasn’t surprised to see Vision, among other names. More surprising was the name of one Natasha Romanova.

Didn’t they have Rumlow on it already, though?

He yawned and then put his mask and earpiece in his nightstand. Nah, Rumlow had said it himself, he kept to himself. He knew there was horrible shit going on right under his nose, but he took great pains to not get involved. So, they needed someone else. Someone like Bucky.

How was he going to approach Romanova when he’d already gone to see her during Rumlow’s patrols?

He sighed and fell asleep, unable to shake the feeling that he wasn’t alone in the room.

* * *

He showed up to his shift at the bar on the eighth of July around eight p.m., feeling crusty and unkempt even though he’d just had two days off. He had spent them crisscrossing the district, getting a feel for the port and the people, and sending out sparse messages to Phillips, making plans for if he succeeded, making plans for if he did not.

His mask felt oddly comfortable. He knew from experience that standard-issue masks could be so annoyingly scratchy, and some gave skin rashes or caused jaw pain. But this one looked like it had been specially tailored, not standard. He wasn’t too sure about taking it off regularly, but during his scouting of the district yesterday, he’d noticed how the more permanent citizens of the port, union workers who stayed there all day every day, tended not to wear them. Romanova hadn’t worn a mask, either.

Maybe there was something to this mithridatism idea. Or maybe unions had an ironclad control over their workers, and when there was an outbreak, everyone doned protective gear, no questions asked?

He wiped the bar down thinking idly about this and the differences in the day to day life in each sector.

“Beep beep!” Pietro yelled; Bucky leant back against the counter to let his coworker pass. “Thanks Seriy.” Bucky grunted noncommittally, having instinctively made the decision to play Sergei as a sullen, no-nonsense man.

The interruption gave him some time to look over the bar and scan the patrons who were mingling. Low lighting and black lights really fucked with his sense of facial recognition, so he had begun to check people out regularly, trying to get used to it.

The door opened, letting in a bit of fresh air and mingling the droning noise of the bar with the din of the street.

Bucky threw the rag aside in the little basket made for them under the counter and readied himself to take the order of the newcomer.

The man walked up to the counter. Bucky looked at him and smiled, knowing fully well that only the crinkle of his eyes would show. The man was lanky, with cheekbones that could cut if you got too close. His thin lips were quirked in a half smile, his jet-black hair had some electric blue optic fibers running through it, and his eyes…

Reflected the light.

His

eyes.

Fuck. Laufeyson.

 _“New orders,”_ came the voice in his earpiece.

“ **R** eady **T** -”

“Hi, I’ll take your strongest beer on tap,” Laufeyson requested.

Bucky shook his head, a migraine piercing through his temples and forehead. He frowned. He knew this person. Fuck, Loki Laufeyson, right? He had new orders. Beer on tap. New orders, new orders, new orders, new—

Bucky shuffled over to the row of tap handles. There was someone right behind him.

“You’re new here, right?” asked the man. Asked — he knew that man, and he needed —

_“Retrieve the package.”_

The pain was so fierce that he felt like his head would split in half. But he…

He blinked.

“Pietro, take over. Break.” He didn’t wait for his coworker to catch up, only left the half-filled beer glass and the customer before making a beeline for the employees-only door. He opened the door, and as it snicked shut behind him, he—

He opened the locker of someone named Smerdyakov. There was a package.

“Package retrieved, standing by.”

_“Proceed to location as planned.”_

He wasn’t in pain. Someone needed to do something, but he didn’t know who, what, where. It was of no concern.

The instructions had been clear. He had been briefed that morning, received instructions earlier in the week, then had been put to sleep so that the person in him could walk and talk and live and…

He donned a pair of gloves. He took a bag that had been lying around and shoved the package inside, shouldered it, and then slipped out of the bar through the back door. Once in the small alleyway, he jumped onto a dumpster, jumped from there to a balcony, and scaled the building easily with the help of makeshift scaffolding. He went through an open window on the third story and into a covered alleyway that had been the corridors and rooms of an apartment building once, but had been torn down to create narrow streets above the actual street level. Everywhere around him were a mix of Habitat-approved and not-yet-legalised housing and temporary shops selling wares of dubious origins.

His handler’s instructions had been to give the package.

He stopped at the designated shop and rang a bell on a counter. A woman came out from behind a moth-eaten curtain and looked at him with visible displeasure. He was indifferent to this.

She gave him back another parcel and a gun in a case.

_Gun. Illegal illegal illegal ille—_

He made his way through the labyrinthine guts of the cobbled-together building. He went down a set of stairs, which stopped before they reached the ground floor, right in front of a bare wall. To the right, there was a window.

He opened the window, stepped over the sill, and then crossed over the street on a lunarcrete beam to a closed window on the other side.

He took out a knife — he had a knife, it was a nice knife, someone had given it to him because it was practical, _a cool birthday present_ , he — He took out a knife and slipped it between the frame and the window, jiggling the low-quality fixture until it popped open. This wasn’t the first time someone had broken in here.

He climbed in. There was no one around.

This was someone’s flat.

He didn’t spare any time looking at their pictures, their life.

His orders were specific.

He put the package in a cupboard in the small kitchen area. He pulled the weapon out of its case and put it in the pre-arranged drawer.

He made his way back.

Sergei’s headache was unbearable, he felt like he had passed out or something. He came to in the restrooms, feeling woozy and a bit nauseous. Aside from his splitting headache, he also had a keen sense that something was very, very wrong. When Pietro came to check on him, Sergei only grunted in pain and continued clutching his head until the feeling passed.

“Hey.”

Sergei looked up, and gritted his teeth against the sudden double vision and white-hot pain lancing through him from the back of his neck to the top of his head.

Pietro looked concerned and forced a white pill into Sergei’s hand. Sergei took his hand back as if he’d been burned; he hated when people touched him.

“Ah, come on, don’t balk, Seriy.” Pietro gave him a glass of water, then. “Aspirin.”

“Спасибо,” Sergei rumbled, and grudgingly took the proffered medication. He felt like he had forgotten something. Like a word on the tip of his tongue. Like figuring out where déjà vu had happened. And he knew he wasn’t alone, either; he felt as if a third person was right behind him.

Pietro looked surprised, “Ого! Не знал, что ты говоришь по-русски.” 

He gulped back water and aspirin, felt suddenly parched, and drank the rest of the water without taking a breath. He nodded. “Я родился в Санкт-Петербурге.”

“Я со станции Земля-Марс.”

Sergei hummed a noncommittal answer and rubbed at his right temple.

Pietro scoffed. “Выглядишь дерьмово.” 

“На себя посмотри.” 

Pietro laughed as if this was the joke to end all jokes, because the kid was so hyper he could power an electrical plant. “Okay, I’m covering for you till you get better.” And he bolted towards the front room.

As soon as Pietro left the bathroom, Sergei stood up and looked all around him. “Whoever you are, come out,” he growled. He turned around and ended up looking at the mirror above the sink.

He.

The door to the restroom banged against the wall, and Bucky whirled around in alarm.

“What the fuck, Sergei?!” Pietro bustled inside, pushing Bucky to the side. “What the fuck?”

Bucky hesitated, unsure, and looked on passively as Pietro used a broom to sweep up the broken pieces of the mirror. “I. Uh…”

Pietro clucked his tongue, “If your migraine is so strong you took a tumble into the mirror, you should go home.”

No, Bucky had seen. There had been someone. He had.

“Come on, Sergei, you’ll be no help in there in your state.”

“I can get it.” Bucky pointed to the shards of mirror all over the place. “You go to the counter, I’ll sweep,” he offered, although he felt nauseous just thinking about seeing his own face in the broken glass.

“Nope, you get out, come back tomorrow.”

Bucky felt grateful for this respite, and all but fled to his cover flat. It was blessedly empty but for Alpine, who looked at him haughtily from his perch on the windowsill.

Bucky went to sleep feeling like he wasn’t alone.

* * *

Bucky felt mightily drained after the moment he’d had in the backroom two days ago. He was looking forward to his next day off, and thought that resting should be in order. He felt paranoid, had thought he’d heard voices — but those were just the neighbours he could hear through the paper-thin walls — and the slightest noises made him jump. His communications with Phillips were erratic, depending on the commissioner’s ability to change the encoding regularly. They had to be cautious.

Bucky took the phone out of his pocket and the light blinked yellow, a sign that he could safely send out messages.

“Did the rounds. Jessica Jones, dock thirteen union, busted for possession of firearm. Tailed her twice, visibly cyborg, listed in the tablet. Asked around, she’s agnostic and commune-unionist. Didn’t ping as a transhuman when asking around.”

Bucky picked up Alpine and rubbed his nose on his cat’s head, thinking. Alpine purred and Bucky fake-chomped on Alpine’s soft ears until the cat meowed and began kneading at his thigh.

After contemplating his wording, he wrote, “Gut feeling: she was set up.” To hell with it. He could impart his gut feelings. Burden of proof wasn’t on him in this ass-backwards spy game.

It was all about him bearing witness.

As he looked over his little shabby one-room kitchen-bedroom-living room combo, and its single window only lit by the street-hallway neons, Bucky thought that, really, detective work was overrated.

He closed his eyes and took two seconds to listen to the building’s noises, trying to alleviate the feeling of being watched. People were fighting somewhere nearby. A man from a wandering boutique selling second-hand valves and washers was haggling, haranguing people in the hallway outside his window.

Bucky sighed as his personal phone buzzed again. It was a message from Becca. She’d been worried about this recovery cover story, troubled by him getting some mods. She knew his discomfort with the whole cyborg thing. Now that he was technically cyborg, he realised that his queasiness mostly stemmed from the odd sensation that not everything in his body was… flesh. And blood.

Anyhow, she knew something was amiss, but didn’t know how much or why. He’d been evasive, telling her he only had reduced windows of time where he could communicate because he needed rest. He sat on his bed and thought about answering Becca, but then he heard someone knock on his door.

Before he even had time to get up, Rollins came in, easy as you please, with his own set of keys and smiled. “You have—

_New orders._

A phone buzzed.

“ **R** eady **T** o **C** omply.” He looked at the phone.

The display read “Beckini”.

Irrelevant.

A cat was whining at his feet. The man in the flat came over to him and deposited a package on the table. “Get it to the backroom of the Saturn’s Rings Club.”

“Understood.” He opened the package, finding that it contained only a weapon, unmarked, and a list of numbers.

“Agent.” He looked up into the man’s eyes. “Someone is sabotaging our op. You need to find Loki Laufeyson. Isolate the subject by any means necessary. Subdue him. Bring him to base.”

“Understood.”

The man exited the flat without another word. He stayed frozen for a beat. Then he looked at the phone screen again and saw several messages from “Beckini” and an official-looking email about a dock entry request for James Buchanan Barnes being approved.

He got up and proceeded to get ready.

He… Bucky…

Sergei blinked at his phone, feeling lost and unmoored. Down at his feet, his cat, not his cat, _a_ cat, meowed.

Someone should feed the cat. His phone… Whose phone? He checked the—his phone.

What the.

Next thing Sergei knew, he was in front of a door.

“Bucky?” Becca. He knew her, she was a sister, but not his, his sister was Yelena, she lived in Iekaterinburg. She was the sister to somebody. _To me!_ “Why haven’t you been answering my calls?” He shook his head. “And what the fuck are you doing with Alpine here? You told me you had to rest!”

He looked down at the cat cradled in his arms, a white ball of fluff scratching at his… bomber jacket? He looked back up at his sister and felt his intake of breath, filtered by his face mask.

“I… I don’t know.”

“Bucky… Wh—” She stared straight at him and grimaced. “Do you want to come in? Is this about Steve?”

“Steve?” He blinked slowly, then shoved Alpine towards Becca. “Take him.”

“What? Bucky?” Why did she insist on calling Sergei “Bucky”? The cat twisted in her arms and half climbed onto her shoulder. “What’s this on his neck?”

“I don’t know, I must go.”

“Bucky!”

“It’s okay.” Sergei quickly stepped away and ran off into the night, but couldn’t outrun the sensation that someone was right there on his heels, screaming a name he couldn’t hear.

* * *

Steve exhaled shakily.

Asking for dock entry was the easy part.

Docking was the easy part. Getting out… not so much.

Steve looked at the messages on the ship’s dash asking him to please hold, as the docking authorities were on their way. He was dressed in glorified pyjamas with nothing more than the emergency Kassnar gun and several spare e-S.P.A.R.K.s cartridges. He had no ID on him, no shoes, and was presumed dead. He had also assumed Bucky’s identity.

He was out of ideas and knew that this was his luck, running out.

He closed his eyes and listened for a brief moment to the strange song he had started hearing around the halfway point between the Moon and Lagrange four. He didn’t know what it was but it sounded… oddly peaceful.

He needed peaceful.

An automated message from spaceport authorities bleeped, interrupting his relaxation, and he looked at the message blinking on the dash, telling him that the docking door would open in ten minutes when the authorities had arrived.

Problem was, he knew those authorities wouldn’t be Bucky. Maybe Bucky had received an alert on his phone from the spaceport, but then, what would he make of it? Because Steve knew that Bucky would think he was long dead. He’d never think, “Oh yeah, this message definitely means my long-lost partner-in-every-way has come back from the dead.”

Shit.

He was up shit creek with no paddle, and no. Fucking. Shoes.

He needed a plan, and he needed it quick.

He couldn’t leave the ship; the docking area partially opened onto space. There was only one way out of the ship to the docking area, and it was down the hatch. He needed to take a ladder down through the hatch, which opened onto the docking hallway. This hallway was really no more than a tube with something like a third of normal gravity. At the end of the hallway was the door into the labyrinth of tunnels and platforms and docking and storage areas that made the spaceport more than just a glorified airport in vacuum.

Only one way to go. No escape routes.

Sure, he could hear electricity and other power sources — and this eerie song he was beginning to think was the space colony, since he’d been able to hear the space colony while he was still thousands of kilometres away in space — and he was stronger. Maybe even quicker, more agile.

But he wasn’t sure how much, nor for how long and at what cost. Also, he wasn’t indestructible, because the wipeout sure could dissolve bullets, but it wasn’t instantaneous, and it was far from a pleasurable experience.

Steve let his head fall onto the cockpit’s dash and closed his eyes.

He needed to think. **Think**!

He looked up out of the cockpit’s window and saw another ship making its final approach. Looked like a freight ship hauling a massive amount of cargo. They got docked in no time, then both cargo bays opened, one from the ship and the one from the station, and a conveyor belt was automatically extended between them that joined both ship and station.

Steve could see, beyond the open doors of the colony cargo bay, ascending and descending conveyor belts, mechanised arms, and robots ferrying shipments from the bays down to the station. That area would have a very low level of surveillance, cameras mostly placed to look for mechanical failure. Dockers only operated there when necessary, because the heavy machinery combined with the weightlessness was a fucking death trap.

Steve closed his eyes and breathed out slowly.

Either surrender to port authorities as a dead man, knowing that he hadn’t been spaced by accident, and the someone or someones who had spaced him would then know immediately where he was. He’d be jailed, again, first for impersonating an officer of the law, and then for whatever the military would like to stick on him.

Or he could tempt Fate for the hundredth time. He was quite apt at playing around in low-gravity environments; he’d gone spelunking in the innards of the colony enough times to have a chance of coming out unscathed.

The real problem was how he was going to manage to jump from one ship to the other.

Another message blinked on the cockpit screen; he now only had something like five minutes left.

Steve donned the spacesuit he’d stashed in one of the receptacles of the small ship and picked up two string guns. He strapped the Kassnar to his hip, checked the air tank on the suit, checked the latches and the seals. He took the X-ray he had made of himself, then reconsidered and grabbed the whole medkit.

He went back to the cockpit and ran a scan of the area to get a feel for the relative positions and distances.

The freight ship was docked a bit more than two hundred metres away, axis-side. Standard string guns — those tether-line squirt guns that were standard compulsory materiel present on all ships — only extended a hundred metres. Even if the ships had been precisely two hundred metres apart, accounting for the deviations in trajectory, the fact that reaching the end of his tether coil would make him bounce back, plus all the other dumb shit that weightlessness could do to you…

Fuck, this could be a shitshow.

Steve closed his eyes and gulped. Taking stock of himself, he felt his gut clench around whatever the wipeout was doing to him. He also felt his heart rate spiking and then going back to normal quickly, then spiking again. But right now, he had other, more pressing worries than whatever the weird shit he had been exposed to was doing to him.

He activated his magnetic boots and walked heavily through the galley to the hatch. If only he had had a suit made for spacewalks that fateful night. Haha, if only. Everything would have gone to shit in a handbasket, anyway, the wipeout sample would have gnawed through his suit soon enough, anyway.

He thought he was doing okay, or would be doing okay, until he heard the hiss of decompression as the hatch prepared for opening. He looked around, everything thrown into sharp focus. Decompression, did he have enough air? Did the mag boots work? He felt his breathing go ragged and he heard himself let out a small whimper.

Then the latches came off and the hatch door slid open.

And Steve.

Stared into space.

* * *

This was such a bad fucking idea, oh sweet baby Jesus. Steve looked up and blinked at the freight ship and its conveyor belt, grey against the infinite black field dotted with unblinking white stars. Red and yellow warning lights shone intermittently down the length of the spacefield, showing which docks were empty and which were occupied.

A wave of cold resolution washed over him. The tips of his fingers tingled in the heavy gloves of his vacuum suit. He could only hear his own trembling breaths, the squeaks and soft whirrs of his suit, and the creaking song of the colony’s mainframe, like a whale, like a hum.

Here went nothing.

Steve took his first string gun out. His whole plan relied on how much of a punch they packed. He looked up to check the relative position of the freight ship again, right above him, but slightly forward. He turned around, facing the decompression hatch of his own stolen ship. Checked again and fired the string gun down at his feet.

Reaction force sent him careening into the void. He saw his ship getting smaller and smaller so very fast.

No time to think. He looked up — adding momentum, changing course, oh mama, fuck fuck fuck. Eyeballed the distance.

He was on course and veering abaft, maybe.

Before he hit halfway and the tension of the string could send him rebounding out into space, he clicked the release on the gun and then the button that triggered retraction without moving his hand – he did not need the added angular momentum.

The rush of blood in his ears was like a deafening waterfall. It was as if his focus was so sharp and his adrenaline running so high that his ears had disengaged.

He was in freefall, with nothing to tether him anywhere. One hair’s breadth away from being lost in space, again.

His course got wobbly quick; the retraction of the first string was pushing him off course, and raising his arm had added even more torque to his trajectory. Soon, instead of going closer to the freight ship, he would drift further away.

He couldn’t hear anything, just static. Holy fucking shit, he was deviating.

He fired his second gun at the freight ship, because if he was still out of range, then he was toast any fucking way you cut it.

He was in freefall. Oh no, oh shit, oh mother…

…

He felt the string ping as it connected to the ship, a tension in the tether that vibrated all the way down to his arm.

“Oh fuck. Oh mama. Oh my…” The first string was almost entirely retracted into the gun, coiling like a snake on its way in and setting him on a weird, curved, outbound trajectory. Hopefully this wouldn’t unmoor the second string. He clicked the retraction of the second gun, and felt himself pulled brusquely towards the ship.

He was okay.

He was.

Fine.

The hull of the freight ship was closing in rapidly. It was closing in way too fast. At this speed, there would be no guarantee he’d actually be able to stick to the hull.

Fuck.

He fired the first — now entirely retracted — gun and in quick succession stopped the retraction on the second one, betting on the first gun’s recoil to counter the retraction speed of the second.

“Mama, mama, please, please, I’m sorry… Oh shit oh… FUCK!”

The freight ship was now just a wide expanse of grey hull obscuring his vision. He closed his eyes and pulled on the loosened tether, using the movement to rotate and arrive feet first.

Hopefully.

Please.

His right foot adhered to the hull thanks to his mag boot, but his left knee connected instead of his boot. He bounced off the hull, but not out into space. His momentum had broken what could have been a… very bad outcome of bouncing off the hull.

The shock hadn’t done any good to his trajectory, though, and Steve was now drifting quickly across the surface of the hull, turning slow somersaults he had no control over. He huffed a sharp breath and made an abrupt gesture, raising his arms forcefully to give himself some torque to counter his spin. He threw the second gun, which had been untethered, so that maybe, just maybe, he could stabilise himself and…

Reach…

Just so.

His feet connected with the hull and finally managed to stick to it, right at the limit of the last half-retracted string.

Just a bit more and he would have been pulled into a completely random trajectory.

He felt like vomiting, maybe.

But now was no time to barf.

He had a fucking colony to infiltrate.

* * *

The flat was empty when he got back home. Sergei looked around, closed the door, the blinds and then threw himself on one of the kitchen chairs.

The last two hours were kind of a confused blurr. Maybe he’d drunk too much during his shift? Wait… did he have a shift?

For reasons he didn’t understand, he couldn’t turn his back to the room as he prepared for bed. He spat his toothpaste into the sink and looked at the mirror. His own mildly confused face looked back at him. He thought he heard a scream, like tinnitus but much louder, but when he listened closely, only the usual noises of the building were to be heard.

He frowned and went to sleep.

* * *

Steve didn’t even know how he had gotten here. The last few hours of his life had been a haze of internal screaming and blind, wild panic. Ever since he had finally crash-landed on the hull of that ship, he had been swimming in confusion and coasting on automatic responses.

He’d ditched the vacsuit and magboots somewhere in a hatch. He didn’t remember.

Walking barefoot down the street, he had just reached the limits of the spaceport district and was slowly approaching the outskirts of segment one. Of his journey from freefall in space to here, he could only recall grappling with cargo crates in erratic gravity fields and getting nearly smashed to death by some chains supporting heavy machinery. He remembered bright noises, loud colours, the vague sense of walking blindly in tunnels and amongst throngs of anonymous faces.

He remembered breathing, mostly, trying desperately to breathe through the panic. In through the nose, out through the mouth, shutting down his brain every time he thought of that specific moment where he had let go of his own ship, but still couldn’t reach the second, like a speck of dust asking to be blown into space.

Again.

The street was getting wider, so Steve stopped and leant against a wall to catch his breath.

Noises came from all around him, but he couldn’t make sense of them. They also came from inside himself, sounds he could hear without using his ears. Vibrations, hums and hisses, noisily warning him of something he couldn’t even perceive.

Steve looked up and around, trying to make sense of something, anything.

He just… he just really needed to get to Bucky.

He just really needed Bucky.

Steve started walking again.

His feet were killing him, but the sensation of ants crawling everywhere under his skin seemed to have divided over two regions of his body. His belly still felt weird. His feet felt like they were covered in a thick film which clung to the soles. After his ears started to ring once again and he ducked behind a wall to prevent being seen by a surveillance camera, he exhaled deeply, and when he opened his eyes again, he lifted his feet and looked at the soles. He saw that his skin had definitely turned grey. A grey not dissimilar to brushed titanium, dull, unreflective, with random striations narrow and wide, thin and thick, snaking from his toes to his heel, moving like the smallest snakes.

He blinked and decided to just… not.

Just not.

Steve walked on. He had two more segments to cross without being seen. His body wasn’t his own, no problem. Steve swallowed back a whine of distress.

He needed to get to the flat and crash there. He’d be able to crash and burn. Later.

He walked on, dodging cameras, ducking behind walls and buildings, taking looping roundabout paths to avoid surveillance. All the while, his inner sense that was sensitive to electronic devices whined in near-constant alert, like a whistle blowing harder the closer he got to one of the millions of eyes that the colony had on its residents.

He felt trapped, he felt seen, he felt hunted.

Heart in throat and with no idea whatsoever of how much time had passed — four hours forty minutes and six seconds, his novel sense of time supplied, but Steve discarded the information immediately — he finally reached their street. The sense of familiarity was so jarring after so much time spent in a cell, in space, in a coma, in the fog of terrified uncertainty that he was swimming through.

His throat felt so tight he thought he would cry. He really thought so, and then his own body rebelled against everything and he dry-retched into a shrub on a street corner. He gagged, as nothing seemed to come out, though he still felt like he wanted to barf. He wiped his face with his hand and stayed there, hunched over that stupid plant in the corner of a sidestreet, exhausted, dizzy, and so relieved and afraid at the same time that he had trouble recognising both feelings for what they were.

Steve exhaled and gathered his wits. At this point, his body was only the numb vehicle of his scattered thoughts, so when it turned around of its own accord, he let himself go on autopilot, walking to the building that housed his and Bucky’s flat.

He thought that he smiled.

He stopped in front of the door. Where the names were.

Where their names weren’t.

Steve touched the nameplates listing the residents with the tips of his fingers.

He almost didn’t feel the pain when his nails, covered with grey powder, broke through the plates.

* * *

He may have lost time here.

He didn’t know.

He only knew he was crying but his body wasn’t.

* * *

He slammed his body against the door in front of him, a different door, out of breath and unable to comprehend what was happening. Where the fuck was he? Where the fuck was Bucky? He didn’t even know who he was anymore, right?

He was dead anyway, was that why Bucky wasn’t there?

Was Bucky alive?

“Who is it?” a voice said.

A voice. A door opened.

Steve — he was Steve? — had curled up on the floor in front of the door. He looked up at the voice and saw.

“Sam?”

Sam’s eyes widened, bewildered, uncomprehending “… Steve?” he whispered with the kind of voice one uses in religious buildings and funeral offices.

Steve whined in distress and struggled to breathe. He wasn’t alive, right? He was dead. He felt like he was underwater, oh, Ma, please…

Sam looked like he was saying something but Steve had no way of understanding anything he said. “—Steve?” Sam kneeled down in front of him so that they were on the same level.

Steve shook his head, panic building up inside his mind like a tower, like a spire piercing his skull. He thought he was saying something, but he also couldn’t seem to draw a breath.

“Steve, please, Steve, you need to breathe.” Sam reached out to him, maybe to touch, or hold, or comfort.

Steve recoiled, scrambling and crawling backwards on the floor. “D-d-d-”

“Steve, what…?”

“Nnnn-n-n-no. T-touch.” Steve stammered.

Sam raised his hands in front of him and nodded slowly. “Okay, okay, Steve, I won’t touch you. Okay. But you need to calm down.”

“Eyes.” Steve huddled back against the wall, curled into a ball. “Eye… d-d-d-d-don’t.” He huffed short puffs of air, hyperventilating. As he stammered, he also crept along the wall to get closer to Sam. He felt like his body was in overdrive, trying to regulate this…

“You’re having a panic attack, Steve, okay?” Sam moved away from the doorway slightly, hunkered down to stay at Steve’s level. “I’m gonna need you to come inside, on your own terms, but you need to come inside. You’ll be safe here.”

Steve closed his eyes, and his eyelids felt like someone else’s eyelids, just like his body, which wasn’t really his, and he was dead anyway, and Bucky was nowhere. His ears were ringing in alarm, and his thoughts were zooming dizzily around his brain. He felt like he was drunk, everything spinning, and closing his eyes just made stuff spin differently. He opened his eyes again, feeling his gorge rise, and his own body fight it back down — was it because of the wipeout? He dragged himself along the wall and crept inside the doorway like a dislocated puppet.

He might have lost time again, but without really fainting, because when he was next aware, he had hunkered down next to Sam’s couch and Sam was crouched in front of him. Sam had thrown a blanket over him at some point, and was talking to Steve in a gentle, smooth voice, recounting some random story about that culinary show _Yummy Yum Yum_ and some contestant who had made a delicious cheesecake.

“What?”

“Steve?” Sam came a bit closer, sitting so that their legs nearly touched. “You back with me?”

Steve blinked. “Sam? What the… What am I doing here?”

Sam huffed a breath and half smiled. He hung his head for a second, hiding his face, before he looked back up, a bit teary eyed. “I think that should be me, asking that question, shouldn’t it?”

Steve reached out, but recoiled at the last moment, wrapping himself up in the blanket like it was armoured protection. “Sam, I—”

I shouldn’t have come here.

I missed you.

I missed Bucky.

I’m sorry.

I’m dead.

“Fucking hell, Steve, I thought…” Sam swallowed back some tears and sniffed, wiping his eyes. “Okay. Just. Give me sec.”

Steve retreated inside his cocoon, dazed and numb. He watched as Sam seemed to gather his wits and focus, find his footing again. Steve looked on in a detached kind of way as his friend gripped the material of his own sweatpants tight, clenching his fists before releasing them.

He was captivated, in that very unique post-trauma way.

It felt so strange, felt so strange to feel in action all those things they taught him about back at the academy , like how to care for a trauma victim. Except he was the victim in shock here.

Huh.

Steve gently hummed a small song to himself. When Sam looked at him, he abruptly stopped.

“Right, first I’m gonna get you some water, okay?” Steve only stared back at him mutely. Sam nodded to himself and disappeared from view. Steve heard some rummaging elsewhere in the flat before a glass of water showed up in his field of vision. He observed the glass like a strange bug under a microscope. “Okay.” Sam reappeared and sat close. “Okay, Steve, you have to drink, bud.” Steve hummed his assent quietly but really couldn’t fathom unwrapping himself from the blanket. “I’ll try not to touch you much, okay?” Sam approached Steve as if he were a wild, feral creature, and gently pressed the rim of the glass to Steve’s lips.

It took some coaxing, but Steve finally managed to drink. And drink. And drink.

“Okay, slow down, champ.” Sam took the glass back and Steve whined mournfully at the loss of that cool feeling. When had he drunk last? Hours ago? A day? Less? More?

“Okay, now, I’m gonna get you something to eat.”

Sam disappeared.

This was ridiculous.

Eating is for living things. Animals. Plants. Humans. And he was none of those?

“Okay, champ, here you go.” Sam brought some sort of snack. Smelled nutty. Honey. Sam pressed the bar to Steve’s lips and he began munching on whatever it was on reflex.

Then it was a slice of apple. Another.

Steve felt ravenous.

At some point Sam stopped feeding him and Steve swallowed his mouthful. They stared at each other for several seconds.

“Sam… where’s Bucky?”

Sam snorted. “You never fucking change.” Steve stayed silent, not knowing how to answer that statement. “Okay, Steve, do you feel better?”

Steve slid the blanket off his head a bit. “Maybe.”

“Okay, let’s try to sit you on the couch so I can see if you have any injuries.”

Steve blanched and shook his head. “No, don’t touch me, please…”

“Steve, I—”

“No, Sam, you don’t understand, you can’t touch me.”

Sam looked askance, still close, but not touching him. He deliberately moved his hand closer to slide the blanket off of Steve’s head a little more. Steve trembled, but let it happen. “Okay, what’s going on?”

“It’s dangerous.” Steve licked his chapped lips and stared at Sam. “It’s dangerous touching me. I have something… in me. There’s something. Weird,” he said haltingly. “It saved my life, I think, but now it’s everywhere.”

Sam cocked his head, puzzled. “Okay. This thing… did it hurt you?”

“No, it— it’s like a weird protection.”

Sam hesitated a bit, clearly choosing his words carefully. “So… it hurts people?”

Steve opened his mouth to answer but then he thought back to everything that had happened during his escape and… drew a blank. “Not… exactly.”

Silence fell over them as Steve racked his brains, trying to remember each time he had made contact with a human being. He _did_ punch and kick people. He remembered distinctly scratching and clawing at Odinson’s face and implants. But after he had managed to get out of the chokehold, Odinson didn’t have any distinct… traces of the wipeout.

He was also thinking back, at the same time, to that terrifying moment of absolute certainty, in the hatch, as he waited for his death, that he would be gnawed and melted alive by this filmy, powdery metamaterial.

“Steve?”

“What?” Steve felt his jaw unclench as he answered.

“Just calling you back to me, man.” Sam gave him a friendly smile. “So, are you okay to try a hug then? Because, man, I would really like a hug myself right about now.”

Steve pondered the concept. A hug. He could. Maybe. Maybe he could hug someone, if… nobody had been hurt before. He had hurt people, but nobody had been melting.

Steve pulled his hand out of his blanket nest, and extended it toward Sam’s arm, where he had rolled his sleeve up to his elbow. Gently and reluctantly, he finally grazed his fingertips over Sam’s skin and then watched for several seconds, waiting with bated breath for any sign of a sudden flare-up of grey on his friend’s skin.

There was none.

After a while, he brushed the palm of his hand over Sam’s forearm and then gripped it, and nothing happened, apart from being brutally reminded that this was the first non-violent human contact he had had in… eighty-three days. Holy shit.

Steve choked on a sob and threw himself into Sam’s arms.

Sam embraced him fully, dragging his friend halfway into his lap. They both buried their faces into necks, hair, shoulders, desperately clinging to each other.

Sam sobbed. And Steve finally managed to weep.

* * *

He crashed. There were no other words for the deep sleep he fell into once Sam relinquished his hold on Steve and brought him to his bedroom. Steve woke up, mightily disoriented, his mind foggy with the too-much-sleep haze he always got had when he overnapped. Then it all came back in a rush: coma, prison, escape, freefall, no Bucky, and then Sam.

He sat up in the bed and looked around the room. The shutters were closed, plunging the room into darkness. He could make out the shapes of a clothes hamper, a chest of drawers with knick-knacks and three pictures on it. His vision adapted to the dark quickly. In fact, so quickly and sharply that soon he could see the room as well as if it were bathed in sunlight.

Sam must have slept on the couch, or he could have slept in the same bed, Steve couldn’t have said, for he had been so dead tired and so far beyond exhaustion that the whole colony could have exploded and he wouldn’t have noticed.

He shuddered.

As he made his way to the living room, he could hear Sam puttering around. He must have heard Steve’s footfalls, because the sounds of his rummaging abruptly stopped and he called, “Steve?”

“Hey.” Steve walked in shyly.

Sam looked at him for less than half a second before he opened his arms.

God fucking damnit but it felt so good to touch another human being.

“You can use the shower; I’m going to fix you something to eat.”

Steve’s inner clock told him it was around ten at night, and he had slept most of the day away. At least he hasn’t slept through the _whole_ day; it was still July twelfth. Nineteen hours. He really _had_ crashed.

“You saying I reek?”

Sam made a show of sniffing the air. “Well you sure don’t smell like flowers.”

Steve chuckled. He had a hard time letting go of Sam. Sam was a full head taller than Steve and his hugs really were second only to B—

Steve shied away from the thought.

A hot shower and some food finished the job of settling him again. That was not to say that he didn’t feel wobbly and like his skin was absent, exposing his soft core to the world. He felt like he could sleep an additional nineteen hours. He felt naked, even with Sam’s cable-knit sweater hanging off his thin frame.

He brought his empty bowl to the counter, his stomach full with a portion of muesli and milk nearly twice as large as what he was usually used to eating. He’d asked Sam for cereal he’d had no breakfast in prison. The wooden bowl clacked noisily in the silence of the flat. He felt Sam staring at his back like a physical touch.

“So…” Steve cringed, but Sam continued, “is it too soon to ask you what happened?”

Steve bit his bottom lip, chewing on it for a second before turning around. “Do you…” He stopped and pondered the date, his internal-clock-on-steroids helpfully providing him with the information that it was a Friday night. Well… they had time, then, he guessed. “What happened to Bucky, Sam?”

“Are you fucking serious?” Sam put his hands on his hips and exhaled angrily. “Asshole. I can’t believe.” Steve gaped at the irritation laced in Sam’s tone. “Okay! What do you think happened, Steve?” Sam poked his finger into Steve’s chest. “You died, you bitch. You died and we mourned. I coped. He didn’t cope as well. That’s it. I’ll tell you all about what happened to Bucky, but please, don’t make this just about him, you ass.”

Steve stared, eyes wide, taken aback at Sam’s vehemence. Maybe he hadn’t been the only one to count the days starting from that fateful night. “Fuck.” Steve took a deep breath, “Fuck,” and wiped a hand down his face. “Fuck. Sorry. Okay.” He shook his head, trying to parse through his feelings, his wanting to always put Bucky first, not wanting to dwell on his time on the Moon Base. He went to hug Sam, who tried to take a step back. But Steve was nothing if not persistent, and he also needed some reassurance — that he himself was alive, that Sam was here, that he got out — and he ended up wrapping his arms around a protesting Sam. “Sorry, Sam. I have a blind spot, I know. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I just. It’s Bucky.”

Sam took a long minute before he finally unwound, wrapping his own arms around Steve’s shoulders. “Not your fault, you were dead.” He sighed. “You might be thin as a rail, but you take up a lot of space in people’s hearts, you know?”

“Dammit, Sam. I missed you.” Steve’s throat clenched with emotion right up to the moment where Sam put his chin on Steve’s head.

“Sam.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t do that.” Sam always did that to shove how tall he was in Steve’s face.

“I’ll do as I want Rogers, you died on me. I missed your small, skinny ass, too.”

“I’m not small.”

“Even Bucky has a whole five centimetres on you, pipsqueak.”

Steve snorted, then covered it with an aggravated click of his tongue and pushed at Sam’s chest to get away from the hug. “You’re terrible and I’m going back to space.”

Sam grinned, and finally, it felt like no time had passed at all, like there had been no death, no disappearances. It felt like those fun nights preparing for their next adventure with… with Bucky griping about them back in the kitchen.

“I’ll tell you about what happened to me… I promise. But first, please tell me…” Steve took a breath, gearing himself up for whatever answer he was going to get. “Where’s Bucky?”

Sam sighed. “Okay.” He gestured to one of the chairs at the counter and sat down on the other one. He seemed to gather his thoughts a bit before speaking. “Bucky. Bucky didn’t take your death well. When they found Bucky, he was catatonic and hypothermic — too close to the hatch breach. He spent some time in the hospital, then about two weeks at Rebecca’s house under intensive care, and after three weeks back home, he was cleared to slowly go back to work. He moved at some point, and really… he… his PTSD was bad, man, like _bad_ bad. He didn’t cope, okay? He really, really didn’t. _I_ didn’t cope well; Becca was. Disconsolate. But Bucky really was on another level of not coping.”

Knowing that people had mourned him while he was stranded in his own hellhole thousands of kilometres away choked Steve up. He felt Sam’s pain like a vise around his heart. “I’m sorry.”

Sam rolled his eyes so hard they threatened to go on their own road trip. “Stop apologizing for dying, Steve, oh my god.” Steve opened his mouth but Sam shut him up with a hard glare. “Stop it.” Steve shut his mouth.

“He looked okay, but that’s it, he just looked okay. He would space out during a conversation, get angry at the smallest stuff, and just be compliant to anything we’d say. Then you know how it goes. He had lots of hoops to jump through, therapy, meetings, paperwork.” Sam paused and he stared at Steve as if he was trying to silently convey something. “I think the therapy regimen he was under wasn’t adapted well enough. He told me something about being classified under loss of a close coworker because you were his detective partner.” Steve looked a Sam blankly, not getting what Sam was hinting at. “They didn’t take the fact that you lived together into account because you were just filed under roommates or acquaintances, so he didn’t get the whole loss of life partner shebang.”

 _Life partners._ Steve bit back a sudden urge to cry, and he blinked rapidly to fight back the tears. “He told me he loved me right there, Sam. And then I died.”

Sam shook his head and took Steve’s hands in his. “You both are such messes…” Steve sniffed, fighting back a wave of grief. “Go ahead, cry all you need, Steve. Not sure you’ve had an opportunity to grieve since that day, huh?” Steve shook his head. No, he hadn’t.

“Then what happened?” he asked, voice thick.

“Then he learnt that your dumb ass had been investigating a detective unit or whatever. I don’t have much more information on this.” _Oh fuck, Lukin’s Vice Unit. Oh no he hadn’t…_ “Steve, he just. He was just drifting, you know? It was like looking at someone acting like Bucky. Can you believe that I ended up comforting his own sister because she was so upset by his refusal to, I don’t know, interact?”

Steve didn’t know what to say. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

“Yeah. He moved out; said he didn’t want a new roommate. Then he asked for a transfer, got into a new unit, got himself a new partner.”

“Who?”

“Some bloke named Rumlow?”

Steve’s jaw hit the counter. “What?”

Sam smiled derisively. “He didn’t sing his praises much, don’t worry. About two weeks ago, give or take, he calls me, says he needs a favour. He asked me to contact your old commissioner.”

“Phillips? Why?”

“Steve, I have no clue what Bucky is doing, but he is in deep shit. He was supposed to send me messages in a ‘not dead’ kind of way. He has a secure line to Phillips. He’s been less and less coherent in his messages to me. Then yesterday night, some hours before the cat dragged you in, Becca calls me and says Bucky just dropped Alpine off at her house, looking kind of hunted or something, and with several visible implants. She said she wants to file a CWU tomorrow.”

For a while, Steve didn’t know what to say. “Implants?” he squeaked out, “Like, cyborg? Implants. But he—“

“Hates them, I know. But then again, his therapist told me he was supposed to be in physical therapy because of implant rejection.”

“This makes no fucking sense!” Steve shook his head to dislodge all of the very terrible, very horrific scenarios playing in his mind. What the fuck, what the fuck had he been thinking, going after Lukin, and why had Phillips not stopped him?

“You okay, Steve?”

Steve exhaled a shaky breath, looking down at the countertop and trying to swallow back tears. “No. I don’t know.” He sniffed and looked around. “Do you have some… tea? Cookies?”

Seeing the diversion for what it was, Sam pointed to the highest shelf in the kitchen. “Chocolate and raspberry. Put them up there so I don’t get tempted.”

Steve tried valiantly to smile and stood up to get them, but quickly realised that if Sam had put them in a place that was nearly unreachable for him, then there was no chance that Steve would be able to reach. He turned sad and scandalised eyes towards Sam, effectively conveying the idea that he felt both deprived and offended that Sam would dare to put sweets on a shelf twenty centimetres too high for Steve.

Sam forced a grin before getting up and very deliberately reaching up to get the biscuits from the upper shelf. He opened the box and Steve took one. “This is for giving me shit twice about my height.” And then three others. “And those are because I’m a soft traumatised fluffball.”

Sam chuckled, humouring Steve, and putting some effort himself towards alleviating the heavy, despairing mood that was weighing on them. He let Steve enjoy his biscuit before prompting him gently, “So what happened?”

“Hmm. Okay, uhh…” Steve went back to the counter and sat down before pinching the bridge of his nose. “Okay, so Bucky and I were investigating a lead… I don’t know where the investigation is at now, nor who picked it up after us. It was a trap, or a setup, or maybe we just had an acute case of wrong place, wrong time. Someone who had codes to override the access hatches tackled me in one. I got spaced, Sam…” His voice wavered, and Sam scooted over to pat his shoulder and ended up leaving his hand there for comfort. “I just remember Bucky’s face, and weightlessness, and I couldn’t get a grip on anything… I know I drifted, for a while. There was also—”

Steve stopped abruptly and looked straight ahead, before looking at Sam’s hand on his shoulder, as if the thick wool sweater was suddenly too thin. He fought his knee-jerk reaction to spring away.

Steve looked down at his waist and scratched the place where he remembered the wipeout had spilled, gnawing at his suit. “There was a… a substance that had been retrieved from a crime scene, and I found some of it right before I got spaced. The thing is very high tech, very much still being researched, and all around dangerous. I got splashed with some, and as I floated away, my suit got breached, the substance leaked through… I don’t remember much else, I didn’t have an air tank with me, we weren’t equipped for a spacewalk.” He stared at Sam’s face, which held no pity, just an unassuming and steady presence. “I died, I swear, I felt myself freeze there. My suit was breached and I felt my saliva boil in my mouth…”

Sam gripped Steve’s hand and they shared a moment of silence, basking in the safety of Sam’s home, of the smell of coffee, the relative silence of the colony only interrupted by the strange robotic whale song that Steve was now convinced belonged to the colony’s mainframe.

Steve sighed, ate another biscuit, and resumed recounting his story.

“Next thing I know, I’m waking up in that room, with a doctor who’s asking me to count to ten and state my identity. They sedated me, and then threw me in a prison cell, a _prison_ , Sam, and I didn’t know why.” Steve blinked back some tears. “They asked me questions, and I couldn’t answer, I didn’t, I.” Steve sighed and noticed the pointed look Sam was giving his arm. He looked down and saw that he had let go of Sam’s hand and was now scratching the skin of his inner arm nervously. Steve stopped and finished his story.

“I counted the days. I was in there for forty-seven days, discounting the time I spent in a coma. I managed to break the door to my cell, got lucky.”

“Wait, wait. Sorry. Steve. Break the door to your prison cell? You’ve got the strength of a hummingbird, Steve.”

“I got stronger.” Sam squinted at him, but Steve ignored that and resumed telling the last part of his journey, for lack of a better word. “I managed to get out. I stole a ship, escaped the Moon Base, came here, used some string guns as grappling hooks in the middle of the docks, and zombie-walked to my apartment. When I saw that Bucky wasn’t living there anymore, I must have teleported to your front door because I don’t know how I got here, but I did.”

“Oooookaay… Well… that’s a lot to unpack…”

“Trust me, I know.” Steve picked the chocolate bits out of his biscuits to have something to do with his hands. “I think I need another hug.”

The warm embrace of Sam’s arms helped Steve, it helped wrap his head around what had happened to Bucky and around had happened to him, too. He took the time to listen to the colony’s voice and sift through his thoughts.

And it all really boiled down to one singular fact.

Bucky was in danger.

Steve pushed awkwardly out of the hug. “Do you have a pair of shoes that would fit me?”

Sam eyed him suspiciously. “I would need to check. Why?”

Steve pointed at the door to the flat. “I’m gonna go find Phillips. He’ll tell me where Bucky is.”

“What? Now?”

Steve boggled. “When else, Sam?”

Sam let his head roll back “Ugh, I can’t, sweet Mary help me with these two idiots.” Sam looked sternly at Steve and pointed to the chair. “When else, when _never_ , Steve. Do I need to remind you I found your clown ass on my doorstep today at three in the morning, nearly nonverbal with shock? You’d better believe you’re not walking out this door without at least another meal, another nap, and some more human contact.”

Steve sidestepped to the counter to plant his hands on it and use that leverage to try and mulishly stare Sam down. “I need to go. Bucky could be in danger.”

“And what use will you be to him if you’re running on fumes?”

“Becca said he was incoherent, he is in trouble, _right now_.” Steve was getting riled up. He’d finally crossed the sea of exhausted calm to reach the shores of aimless panic.

“Steve. For fuck’s sake, I know you so well, my middle name could be ‘Sarah Rogers.’ You are still reeling, exhausted, and one meal away from starved. Come on.”

Steve raised his arms axisward, angry, desperate. “What do you suggest I do? Stay here, map out these four walls and go crazy as the best part of my life is out there getting himself into… all kinds of shit! Aaaargh!” Steve brought his hands down to his face and then back into his hair, which he gripped tightly. He closed his eyes, and when he realized that he was about to cry from frustration, he turned away from Sam.

“Steve…”

“Fuck,” he choked out.

“Steve. Whatever this is, it’s big. You know it, I know it. So at least wait until tomorrow so you can be at your best to tackle it. If you don’t do it for you, do it for Bucky. Do it for me. It’s gonna be hell trying to have your back in one of your new stupid stunts if you’re not a hundred percent here.”

“… You’ll help me find him?”

Sam rolled his eyes again, at his own peril and that of the integrity of his eyesight. “What do you think, dumbass? I’m gonna contact Phillips once you go back to sleep so that we can go get Bucky soon as you’re awake, dressed and fed.”

Steve exhaled a trembling breath. “Sam. I…”

Sam raised a hand, stopping the acknowledgements that were threatening to tumble out of Steve’s mouth. “Thank me by eating your damn biscuits, Steve.”

* * *

Sergei woke up on Saturday afternoon feeling like he had lost part of last night. Maybe all of Friday, even. He frowned as he looked around his small apartment, feeling like there was something missing. Which made him think about several days of feeling like there was something missing. Someone else in there.

He growled, weirded out and annoyed with himself. He had a job to do. Some prick named Laufeyson to catch, right? He was a…

A migraine pierced his brain and he gritted his teeth against the pain.

“Fuck.”

His skin crawled, and he felt an itch around his blackbox implant. As the pain faded, he checked the time. Ouch. Four p.m. already. He needed to get a move on if he wanted to do some reconnaissance today, since yesterday must have been a bust if he didn’t remember anything. What a shitty agent — he was an agent for the government, he knew, he’d been briefed, he knew, shut up — what a shitty agent he made.

As he was getting ready to go outside, his earpiece suddenly came online.

“Barnes,” Rollins said.

Sergei frowned, “Wha—”

“ _New orders._ ”

New orders.

“ **R** eady **T** o **C** omply,” someone answered.

Sergei shook himself out of his doze; he’d been napping, sitting on his kitchen chair, it seemed. Ugh. Time wasted.

He stood up and checked the flat, nothing amiss, apart from that constant feeling of being watched.

He checked under his mattress on impulse. An impulse born from nothing, really. In any case, Sergei checked under his mattress and that’s how he found out that he had a gun under there. A real handgun, which fired bullets.

He spent a long while staring at it in puzzlement, and it must have astounded him much more than he thought, because next thing he knew, he had to run out the door in order to get to his shift on time. How had four hours passed in the blink of an eye? He hadn’t even done any reconnaissance?

God damnit. His neck hurt for no reason.

The walk to the bar was short. Pietro greeted him in Russian and Sergei grunted a “Привет” and immediately set to manning the bar. Several times during the night, he felt like something was right there, lying in ambush on the outer limits of his mind.

Then luck struck, and Sergei couldn’t believe his good fortune.

Loki Laufeyson in the flesh, his target, walked into the bar around midnight like he owned the place. His hair was shot through with strands of neon optical fibres, which made the black so much more profound. He looked around and spotted Sergei behind the bar.

Sergei thought fast and decided then and there to try seducing the target in order to get closer. Could be the easiest way to proceed. Sergei smiled and looked at the man from under his eyelashes, then made to look busy while the target took a closer look at him, as if puzzling over something.

“Hi there,” Laufeyson said cockily. “You ran out on me the other night, huh?”

Shit, what night? When? When? _You know when, you **know**!_

He needed a plausible lie. “Yeah, I was sick. Splitting headaches, I get those,” he mumbled, and tempered this with a half-smile.

The target looked like this explained everything, and so much more. “Ah, I see. So will I get my beer this time?”

“Sure thing.” Sergei smiled widely, eyes crinkling — show the smile, engage, make the target reciprocate. “So, I’m still a bit new here, you come here often?”

Laufeyson smiled back, great. “A few times every week, ever since I moved here, at least.” Sergei brought him the beer, sliding it across the bar on a cyan coaster that illuminated the contents of the glass with an eerie glow. “I like the atmosphere.” Laufeyson swiped his finger through the condensation beading on the side of the glass. “Thanks.”

“So, you like the ass-end-of-space vibe?” Sergei snorted and wiped a glass to occupy his hands as he settled into blatant flirting mode with — he shouldn’t flirt with him because his feelings would — pain flared around his blackbox and over his left eye and he hid his wince by pouring himself a soft drink so that he could drink along with the target and resume this seduction game.

“I like to hear myself talk, mostly. I like to be able to see your face and not be blinded by strobing lights.” Loki winked and drank a swig of beer, looking at Sergei out of the corner of his eye.

“Don’t like people grinding on you?” Sergei brought his hand behind his head to unlatch his mask. “Blinding lights and sweaty people…”

Laufeyson rolled his eyes. “I hate crowds and I hate people, you won’t find me dead in those kinds of places.”

Sergei finally unlatched his mask and scratched the skin around his ears before taking a drink. He saw Laufeyson’s interested gaze heat up a notch as he stared hungrily at Sergei’s throat.

Good.

Make contact, isolate, subdue, bring in.

“Hate grinding bodies too?” Sergei looked at his target from under his lashes.

Laufeyson leaned on the counter, nudged at his drink, and threw a coy glance at Sergei. “I don’t mind one-on-one dancing.”

Obviously interested. Sergei only needed to get him alone. “My shift ends in two hours, you’ll still be here?”

Laufeyson took a swig from his beer, making Sergei wait for his answer. He smacked his lips and smiled. “Well, I need to meet with some people, so I’ll surely be around.” He stood up straight and winked at Sergei before retreating deeper into the bar and seating himself at an already occupied table.

Customers came and went, but Sergei kept an eye on his target the whole time. Laufeyson changed tables two times during the two hours and met with a dozen people. Whenever he could, Sergei took their orders, and thus, their identities. Their discussions looked hushed, like secrets shared, which reinforced Sergei’s idea that Laufeyson was the guy sabotaging the op, — new orders, sabotage, sabotage, _there’s something rotten in_ — or at least he was at the epicentre of the organisations he was supposed to chase — you don’t even know what organisations, you — shut up!

Laufeyson did look less suspicious than all the people he met with; he acted natural, not leaning in to talk, smiling and laughing so that the conversations wouldn’t look exactly like discreet meetings would.

Alas, the other guys didn’t seem to have read the internal co-conspirator memo on carefully-curated appearances of normality.

Two hours later, Sergei was wiping the counter down, tidying up some of the bottles, and arranging the stack of next orders for Pietro. He looked up, and there was Laufeyson, smirking, twirling his neon cyan coaster on the counter next to his empty glass. The coaster was throwing bright diffuse light under Laufeyson’s chin, sharpening his features even more and giving his bright irises an otherworldly glow.

Too bad he was a target, really.

“Let me go grab my coat.”

Sergei came back from the employee area with his coat and bag and joined Laufeyson at the bar. “Your place or—”

“Your place.” He cut Sergei off in a very definitive tone. “My place is a shambles and I have two very nosy roommates.”

Knowing that Laufeyson could be involved in foiling the op, this sounded like a very confident — dangerously confident — move. Maybe even rash. And he knew how rash people behaved because he…

The piercing migraine came back full force, making his left eye twitch. He smiled through it and naturally switched mental gears, focusing back on the task at hand. If Loki Laufeyson was confident to the point of recklessness, so be it. That worked for Sergei.

The walk to Sergei’s building was short. All along the way, their hands brushed together, until “just call me Loki” put his hand on the small of Sergei’s back. As they reached his small dingy flat, Sergei dumped his bag on the hallway floor and reached into his pocket to retrieve his keys. Loki shifted behind him and slipped his hands into Sergei’s back pockets, groping at him.

As he struggled to find his keys and then to open the door, he could feel Loki’s breath, hot and damp on his neck. He could feel his lips, stretched in a smirk on the side of throat.

“Trouble finding the keyhole?”

Sergei chuckled, opened the door, and kicked his bag inside. Loki detached himself from Sergei’s back, all half-smiles and flirtatious attitude. Sergei took Loki by the collar and guided him into the dingy flat, orienting himself so he could bring the man closest to where the weapon had been stashed. “Sorry about the mess.”

Loki let himself be led to the corner of the room that could be construed as a bedroom and brought his hands up to Sergei’s waist. “I just need a horizontal surface and an uninterrupted stretch of time.” Loki winked, his vivid green eyes briefly turning electric blue — Sergei’s mind was screaming _blue eyes_ but he didn’t really know why — and brought Sergei close to kiss him.

Loki’s lips were soft and hungry — there really was something to be said for mixing business with pleasure — and Sergei was of half a mind to try and lead the kiss, but Loki quickly deepened it, and Sergei reached around to grip Loki’s ass. Reflex.

Or maybe it was voluntary.

God, this guy’s tongue was distracting, Sergei thought as he pulled Loki to him, and marched him backwards to the bed. He gasped into the kiss as Loki bit his lip, feeling caught between wanting to enjoy this a bit more and having to move things along. He needed to get this guy on the bed and get to his weapon, stat.

Sergei tilted his head to the side and began mouthing at Loki’s neck, sucking soft and biting kisses along the tendon there, taking advantage of that small, delicious distraction to drag Loki backwards to the creaky bed in the corner of the room.

“Does the bed squeak?” Loki asked with a huff and a moan.

Sergei licked him right under his ear. “Lots.”

“Hmmm…” He felt Loki groping his ass and actively participating in the efforts to get to the bed, now. “Are the walls paper-thin?”

Sergei hummed an affirmative sound and licked into Loki’s mouth again before he answered, lips so close they touched as he spoke. “They totally are.”

Loki smiled mischievously. “Great,” he said with feeling, “be loud.”

As they reached the bed, Loki snaked his hands up under Sergei’s shirt, feeling him up before he pushed him down onto the bed. Sergei let himself fall onto the mattress with a squeak of old springs and looked up into Loki’s face, all hungry and focused on him. Loki’s hair still had light threaded through it, giving him an eerie glow. His eyes changed colour again, switching to cornflower blue and Sergei —

Blue eyes, smile lines, grumpy faces —

“Don’t like the blue?” Loki hovering near Bucky — the pain was so terrible he — Loki hovered near Sergei and threw a leg over him to straddle his thighs.

“I like green.” Sergei took off his t-shirt in one fell swoop and then smiled through the already-receding pain. “You can control it?”

Loki hummed and nodded, putting his hands on Sergei’s chest. “Go on,” Sergei prompted. Loki smirked and pinched his nipples, which went directly to Sergei’s dick. Then Loki slowly swept his fingers from his chest to the front of his waistband, giving the lightest of touches to Sergei’s abs, before following the dip in the middle of his abdomen, ascending bit by bit, mapping out his body. He seemed entirely focused on his task, frowning in concentration, before he reached the light brown hair on Sergei’s chest.

Sergei let him, watching Loki watching him, trying to discern what was happening and how and when he’d have enough leverage and leeway to get to his weapon and the cuffs stashed under the mattress.

Loki finally looked up into Sergei’s eyes, as he swept the tips of his fingers all over his chest and groped his pecs. “Shall we get on with it?”

Sergei smirked and grabbed Loki by the waist before hoisting him up so that their hips were closer together. Sergei hissed as Loki ground up into him, using his hands on his chest to get leverage and arching his back as if Sergei was Loki’s own personal dance pole.

Sergei pawed at Loki’s shirt, struggling with the buttons and managing to get it halfway off before Loki decided to take matters into his own hands.

His skin finally uncovered, Sergei had a few seconds to enjoy the view, a thin torso — skinny, a skinny man — Loki was skinny, and holy shit, he was all for lanky mouthy guys. His skin was pale and nearly aglow with the now-green neon highlights in his hair. All along his left side, the skin was nearly translucent over subcutaneous implanted circuits.

He was beautiful, and considering his smirk, he knew it. Sergei decided to interrupt his thirsty scrutiny and grabbed Loki’s neck to bring him into a searing kiss. He let himself fall onto the bed, Loki draped over him like a cat and grinding down into him.

Their hands wandered, Loki’s in his hair and inside his jeans, and one of Sergei’s hands snaking inside Loki’s underwear…

With his other hand, Sergei groped around beside him, using the kiss as distraction from his blind search for his weapon. His hand had finally reached the handle of his gun — and wasn’t that a feat when someone was actively groping your dick through your jeans? — when he felt a sudden sharp jab on his neck, right on his blackbox.

He tried to push Loki off with one hand, the other grabbing at his weapon. “The fuck!” He felt the whole region around the implant go numb and he instinctively knew this must be Laufeyson’s fault.

He shoved Laufeyson as hard as he could but he held strong, hands on Sergei’s shoulders gripping him so tight he knew it would bruise, maybe even leave the imprint of his nails. Loki stayed seated on Sergei, on Bucky, on someone Sergei didn’t even know, and he brought his weapon up, but couldn’t believe his eyes.

Loki’s hair was lit up with the optical fibers that Sergei had thought were only decorative, as some transhumans liked to have. But several strands were thicker than a simple optical fiber, and they had extended out from Laufeyson’s head, plunging their corner of the room into a bubble of neon green light. Oh my fucking god, he had wired himself to Sergei’s head, to Bucky, to his implant, he was, who was, and he had no fucking doubt that this asshole had connected himself to his implant and… and… shattered mirrors.

_**R** eady **T** o **C** omply._

Dull pain and numbness radiated from his neck and ear. Sergei had to switch hands. “Fucking disconnect!!” He heard his own voice, awash with panic.

Loki chuckled. “Oh, come on now, officer, keep calm this is just—” He stopped abruptly and looked back towards the door.

Sergei grabbed the two optical wires linking them together, and, hoping like fuck he wasn’t going to make it worse, tore them away from his head, severing the connection. Loki gasped and made a grab for Bucky’s arm, but Sergei struck him across the face with his weapon.

Laufeyson was thrown to the ground, and was trying to get up when Sergei heard someone thundering up the hallway outside, and that was all the warning he got before the door to his flat was literally kicked off its hinges.

In the doorframe stood a lanky man, blonde, looking half wild.

He had such beautiful blue eyes.

“Bucky?” The mystery man huffed.

Sergei stared, pain lancing from his neck all down his spine, inside his brain.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” Sergei growled, panicked, cornered.

Down on the floor Loki guffawed and rolled onto his back. Sergei looked back up at the door, and it hurt. It hurt so much to look at that man.

At…

“Bucky? It’s me…”

Bucky Bucky Bucky

“No!” Sergei shook his head frantically, and just as the man took another step towards him, he jumped to the window and then fled into the maze of hallways and buildings of the spaceport.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * Спасибо: [Spasibo] Thanks
>   * Ого! Не знал, что ты говоришь по-русски: [Ogo! Ne znal, chto ty govorish po-russki] Oh you speak russian! I didn't know.
>   * Я родился в Санкт-Петербурге: [Ya rodilsya v Sankt-Peterburge] I was born in St. Petersburg
>   * Я со станции Земля-Марс: [Ya so stancii Zemlya-Mars] I was born on the Earth-Mars relay
>   * Выглядишь дерьмово: [Vyglyadish der'movo] You look like shit.
>   * На себя посмотри: [Na sebya posmotri] You're a shit. Litt. “Look who’s talking"
>   * Привет: [Privet] Hi
> 



	9. Zodiacal Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein emotional reunions happen, at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter took me a week. Things are heating up in France, and I had a minor breakdown (stress, work and news induced, thank you anxiety!) So it took me ages to finish editing this chapter.
> 
> Jehans made me a fucking cool sound effect for Bucky's implant, I hope you'll like the eerie electronic, scary quality of it.
> 
> This chapter is also full of plot tie ins preparing for the ending. We are finally stepping into part 3 of this story!
> 
> Enjoy our sweetly dysfunctional Thorki. I love them.

### Part III, Chapter 9: Zodiacal Light

The Zodiacal light (also called false dawn when seen before sunrise) is a faint, diffuse, and roughly triangular white glow that is visible in the night sky and appears to extend from the Sun's direction and along the zodiac, straddling the ecliptic. Sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust causes this phenomenon. Zodiacal light is best seen during twilight, when the zodiac is at a steep angle to the horizon. However, the glow is so faint that moonlight and/or light pollution outshine it, rendering it invisible.[…]

The Islamic prophet Muhammad described zodiacal light in reference to the timing of the five daily prayers, calling it the "false dawn" (الفجر الكاذب al-fajr al-kādhib). Muslim oral tradition preserves numerous sayings, or hadith, in which Muhammad describes the difference between the light of false dawn, appearing in the sky long after sunset, and the light of the first band of horizontal light at sunrise, the "true dawn" (الفجر الصادق al-fajr al-sādiq). According to the vast majority of Muslim scholars, astronomical dawn is considered the true dawn. Practitioners of Islam use Muhammad's descriptions of zodiacal light to avoid errors in determining the timing of daily prayers. Such practical descriptions and applications of astronomical observations were vital to the golden age of Islamic astronomy.

`― Wikipedia, “Zodiacal Light”`

“Ever since the Pan-Colony Cyborg treaty, we, the cyborg community,  
have been treated like second-rate citizens.  
Join the Post-Human Commune today so we can have a seat  
at the Segment One Communes Council come September!”

`Post-Human Commune Pamphlet, Segment one,  
Lagrange four Islands`

| 

“Getting overwhelmed by paperwork and administrative duties?  
Call the Administrative Support Administration  
to get some help in your day-to-day life!”

`Administrative Support Administration launch announcement,  
Lagrange four Islands`  
  
---|---  
  
“Do you find yourself in increasingly numerous arguments?  
Don’t let it fester, don’t try to solve this alone, call the line!”

`Couples Therapy PSA,  
Lagrange four Island 2, Segment five`

| 

“This door should be kept closed at all times, or at least  
until that arsehole Randy pulls his head  
out of his arse and bloody well repairs it, wanker!”

`Warning graffiti,  
Vesta Mining Operation`  
  
“We are but specks of stardust.  
Believe.”

`Cosmos Credo, Spacer Neo-Catholic Church,  
Moon Base, Civilian side`

| 

“Resources are scarce, food is sparse.  
Better to eat something you don't like  
than to throw it away: stop wasting!”

`Anti-Consumerist Pan-Colony PSA`  
  
Steve was standing in the doorway of the dingy apartment, stunned and desperate, gripping the door handle so forcefully that it creaked in his hand. He felt Sam’s hand on his shoulder, trying to shake him out of his stupor.

“Steve, come on.” Steve only shook his head in denial, slowly releasing his death grip on the handle. He felt faint.

He felt like even standing was too much of a struggle.

Down on the floor, Laufeyson was leaning back on his hands, half-naked and smiling, like this was some kind of a joke, like Bucky hadn’t been standing there less than a minute ago, with that terrible distorted scream that only Steve could hear shrouding him like a cloud — his senses were becoming more and more crossed with time, and Steve didn’t know what to make of it.

“Hate to see him go, right?” Laufeyson said, sarcastic and derisive, and Steve… Steve couldn’t.

The electrical scream of Bucky’s implants had long since faded into the distance, now replaced by a buzz and hiss coming from Laufeyson’s direction. An irritating hiss, snake-like and invasive. Steve took a step inside the room, hands fisted at his sides.

“Steve…”

“You.” Steve marched up to Laufeyson, who only stared back, amused. “You fucking asshole.” Steve felt Sam’s hand grip his forearm, pulling him back. “What did you **do** to him?”

Laufeyson snorted. “What did _**I**_ do?” He scoffed and sat up, brushing his pants haughtily. “Don’t you know anything about one-night stands, you numpty?” Laufeyson squinted exaggeratedly at Sam and Steve. “Who are you, anyway?”

Steve bellowed in rage and actually took a step closer to Laufeyson, hands shaking, before he turned around and walked all the way to the other side of the room, where he immediately punched the wall. In the silence that followed, Sam closed the door behind him and walked up to the kitchen table in the middle of the room, while Steve shook out his hand, sending plaster all over the floor and revealing the — now dented — metal structure behind the plasterboard.

“Okay… let’s all be adults here.” Sam looked at both of them, eyes widening when he saw the dent, and Steve felt that conflicting sense of gratitude for Sam’s ability to de-escalate his anger mixed with that spike of resentment he got every time people were “handling” him. “I’m Sam Wilson and this is Steve Rogers. We came here because we followed a…” Sam looked at Steve, and Steve knew he was searching for the words to adequately describe the wild goose chase they had embarked on late on Saturday night, with only the vague indications of Phillips to go by. They had searched all over the spaceport late into the night, long past when the sunlight had dimmed and neon light sparked up everywhere. Then Steve had heard a sound. A scream.

How were they going to explain it without sounding insane?

“We followed a hunch,” Sam finished lamely.

Still down on the floor, arms loosely circling his knees, Laufeyson rolled his eyes axis-ward and got up to go sit on the bed. Steve leant back against the wall, trying not to, absolutely not to, think about what he thought he had interrupted.

“A hunch.”

Sam glanced at Steve, but Steve stayed focused on Laufeyson, trying to smother the smarmy asshole with his mind. Sam saw that no help was coming from that side, so he continued, “Yes, a hunch. About our friend’s location.”

“Your friend?” Laufeyson pointed down at the bed. “Meaning your friend Agent Double-O Sexypants?”

“His name is Bucky,” Steve growled angrily.

At this, Laufeyson actually laughed out loud, a short acidic bark of laughter that died down quickly. His ironic half-smile stayed, nonetheless. “That’s a cute name for a bloke whose brain is now scrambled eggs.”

Steve felt like he was going to hurl. He felt the antsy sensation of wipeout scrawling under his skin. He felt his vision grey out at the edges; he felt faint again. “What… what do you mean, scrambled eggs?”

Sam looked at Steve worriedly and frowned at Laufeyson. “Quit joking around, asshat.”

Laufeyson scoffed. “Please, call me Loki, I don’t wear arses as hats unless it’s a question of rimjobs—”

Steve cut Laufeyson off, furious. “What did you **do**!?” He pointed at the window. “You hurt him! You hurt Bucky!”

Laufeyson clucked his tongue. “Oh come _on_ , that was self-defense. You never know what could happen with those darkboxed lunatics.”

“His… wha— a darkbox?”

“Well, it sure wasn’t a simple blackbox! It was him, or me. And there wasn’t a lot of him to start with, so.”

“Just fucking SHUT UP!!” Steve got ready to launch himself at Laufeyson, pain beyond the physical seizing his heart, making him want to lash out, but Sam yelled even louder, “NO, YOU SIT YOUR ASS DOWN RIGHT HERE, STEVE. And you.” Sam pointed a finger at Laufeyson. “Explain yourself before I get angry. Steve would never put you in cuffs without probable cause—”

“Well, he bloody well looks like he would deck me with probable—“

“—but I’ve heard enough in the last two minutes to flag your file so many times at Central Med it’ll look like the UN’s front lobby.” Sam grabbed Steve’s arm and, while Steve gaped at him, sat him down at the dingy table. Then he turned to Laufeyson. “Speak, shitbag. Who are you and what were you doing with Bucky?”

Steve sat numbly and watched as that asshole Laufeyson lost his smile and, for the first time since they had barged into the room, actually looked at them as if they were more than illiterate amoebas. Steve glanced back at Sam, who looked _this_ close to losing his own shit, too, and decided that he had better stay put. He splayed his palms on the greasy table.

“My name is Loki Laufeyson,” Loki said as Steve looked back up at him. “But I think you already know this. I wanted to know why your Bucky was following me and also why he didn’t seem to remember me, although we had previously met. I was playing some sort of a game of spy chicken with your friend who, may I say, does not currently answer to the name ‘Bucky.’”

Steve made a sound of distress, a whine, probably, his right leg jiggling like crazy in an effort to stay focused on what Loki was saying and not spiral into whatever that feeling was that loomed in the corner of his mind.

“To what name does he answer, then?” Sam asked, arms crossed forbiddingly.

Loki shrugged. “Sergei, I think.”

Sam uncrossed his arms, looking puzzled. “Who is Sergei?” He turned to Steve, who was having a small inner meltdown. “Steve? Does Bucky have… other relatives, or…?”

Steve shook his head vehemently. “James Buchanan Barnes, no other identities. Phillips told us he was doing undercover work, it’s his cover.”

“Oh, no, Detective, I can tell you it runs deeper than that.”

Steve growled, “How so?”

Loki chuckled and tapped his neck. “That implant? A strange little thing—”

But Steve didn’t wait for him to finish, now that he was reminded again of what Loki had implied. He stood up and pointed at Loki accusingly. “You flashed his implant! You flashed him! You fucker, you know that’s dangerous!”

“I didn’t do much more damage than was already there,” Loki declared haughtily. “He started it, anyway, with his cloak and dagger games…”

“Cloak and dagger? You ran, way back when, you ran. And now I find you attacking him?” Steve accused.

Loki leant forward and propped his elbows on his knees, looking at Steve with his bright neon-green eyes, “I’m sorry, Detective Rogers, but what’s the question here? Why do I spy on suspicious people? Why do I flee the authorities? Why am I a target, maybe? Why was I defending myself, perhaps?”

Steve clenched his left hand into a fist and ignored the frown that Sam sent his way. “Defending yourself? You were straddling him, he was hurting! He’s a detective like me, he could have helped you!” Steve unclenched and clenched his fist again, feeling the acute pain of his skin splitting and knitting itself back together as he did so. “We tried to get to you back in April. You _fled_. _You_ fled,” Steve insisted, sifting through this discussion, and the last several months, like quicksand. He was sinking into a web of lies, fear, and conspiracies.

Loki laughed mirthlessly. “Oh, Detective, I’m sorry, but why should I trust the authorities when they were the ones who killed a coworker right in front of me?” Steve opened his mouth to answer, but Loki pressed on. “Pray tell, Detective, yes, who shall I trust when the _military_ shuts down my lab and then electrocutes someone in front of my very eyes? Why should I go to the police? Why should I go to any admin, to the government? Come on, you _must_ be smarter than that, mustn’t you?”

Sam put his hand on Steve’s fist and tugged so that he would unclench and stop hurting himself. Steve closed his eyes, feeling the wipeout knitting together the crescent-shaped nicks in his skin, and exhaled slowly, trying to release his anger and the terror he felt at the idea that Bucky might have been implanted with a very dangerous device. He wouldn’t be able to find Bucky without knowing what was going on here. He was a detective, he’d sworn to find what had been lost, uphold the search for truth and information, and help people, not just him, not just Bucky. He opened his eyes to see Loki smiling, like he had already won some kind of game. Nobody deserved to be persecuted, be they Bucky Barnes or Loki Laufeyson.

He just had to play it by ear. “Bucky wouldn’t have been in this situation if the Detective administration, if the freaking Lost and Found hadn’t failed him at every turn. And I’m not asking you to trust the military, because I just escaped a military prison on the Moon base thanks to your own on-again, off-again boyfriend.”

Loki got up from the bed in one jerky move and looked suddenly irate and unnerved. “Thor? Bloody Thor, now?”

“Yes! Yes, Thor! He helped me, said… oh shit.” Steve turned to Sam suddenly, reminded of a detail that had slipped his mind. “Sam, we need to tell Phillips, Melissa Joan Gold, Abner Ronald Jenkins, we need to tell him. I think those are the people who killed Martina Ahmed.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “Alright, Steve. Although, I’m sure he’ll want to know where you got those names from.”

“From Thor…”

Loki advanced towards them and slapped his hand on the table. “Do **not** ignore me!” They both startled and looked at him. “Thor was there?”

“Yeah? He was one of my captors. Let me go when I escaped and told me to come find you and that he was sorry.”

If Loki had such a thing as vulnerability, maybe the hint of something-other-than-pissed-off that flashed across his face could have been construed as vulnerability. As it was, he only opened his mouth briefly, as if gobsmacked, and then gritted his teeth and frowned. “I think I’ve heard enough.” Then he went to pick up his discarded shirt, as if he was going outside, as if…

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Going back to my commune flat, it’s three in the bloody morning, I am absolutely knackered, and I need my beauty sleep.”

Steve snarled and slapped the table with his hand, leaving a dent in the metal. “You stay right here.”

Loki didn’t so much as jump at the gesture, while Sam’s eyes bugged out of their orbits, taken aback by Steve’s newfound strength. Loki looked up at the ceiling like he was the most long-suffering person in the whole station and then pointed at Steve while talking to Sam. “Is he always that dramatic?”

Sam scoffed. “Aren’t you glad you found your cosmic twin?”

“This is fucking serious, Loki. I—”

Loki finally seemed to have reached the end of his patience, or maybe it was his anger boiling over here rather than somewhere else, like his own flat. He roughly put on his shirt and took two angry steps towards Steve. “Look, you goose-stepping Johnny-come-too-late, you don’t get to tell me to take this seriously. Do you think this isn’t serious for me? Me, who’s been on the lam for three months? I lost my boyfriend to those fascistic wankers! I was tailed by detectives months before my lab was closed! I had to snake my way into your buddy’s pants just so I could find out what in the bloody hell everybody wanted from me and my commune!” While saying this, he violently threw his hand towards the bed, hinting at the recent _activities_ he had been participating in. Then he poked Steve in the chest. “Where were you and your copper friends, huh? Oh that’s right, setting us cybs up for crimes we didn’t commit.”

Steve had a moment of confusion. “What?” This sounded bad. Not worse, but a different kind of fucked up than what he had suspected. Next to him, Sam was watching the exchange, looking increasingly perturbed. “Shit. I mean, this confirms my hunch that he was a corrupt asshole but… that’s a direction I hadn’t expected it to go in.” This was leagues different than he’d thought he would be investigating when he’d first told Phillips that he had a bad feeling about Vice. But then again, Bucky getting implants, going undercover, and fleeing Steve was a world of difference from him delving into Lukin’s affairs and expecting to find him taking over smuggling operations for his own profit.

Loki crossed his arms over his thin chest, eyes aflame, and did not answer, but glared accusingly at Steve.

Steve licked his lips and was briefly distracted by the electrical sound coming from Loki’s implants. Loki had been persecuted by detectives, maybe the whole of Vice, maybe more, who could know? Then again, back before he was spaced, he had managed to gather some pretty incriminating evidence about that suspicious smuggling. At this point, Steve wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Lukin had been leading a mod trafficking ring and a surveillance operation at the same time.

“Fuck, we need to tell Phillips he needs to bring the whole of Vice down.” Steve mumbled.

“Steve…”

Steve sighed. “And the military.” Gosh, darn, fuck. And find Bucky.

Loki scoffed, but when he saw that Steve was dead serious, he said, “Wait. You really mean it.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Fucking hell, Steve.”

Steve opened his hands palm-up and turned to Sam. “What? It’s what’s bound to happen. I found Loki, and when I find Bucky, we’ll have three first-hand accounts of wrongdoing. I don’t know what Bucky’s plan had been, but with that evidence, Phillips should have enough to put some of our guys on the trail and build up a case.”

“Yeah, I know.” Sam half smiled and shook his head ruefully. “Can’t do anything halfway, right?”

“So, you need your Bucky to start on this crusade?” Loki asked.

 _Yes._ Steve felt his throat constrict, taken by a grief so sudden and acute that he briefly couldn’t speak. He nodded mutely. He needed Bucky, always, period.

Loki walked up to the table, dragged a stool over with his foot and sat down, his medusa hair letting out a hissing sound in Steve’s ears. “You’ll need to stay here, to find him again.”

Steve winced, focusing back on the conversation. “Yes. I know. It took us some time to—”

Loki looked at Sam then Steve and back again. “You can go call that Phillips lad, explain the situation. We can stay here until we find your buddy Bucky.”

“Why?”

Loki smiled widely. “Because fuck Thor, that’s why.”

* * *

Sergei was hidden. The little guy at the door — Steve? Steve who? — hadn’t followed. He’d fled as quickly as he could through the winding corridors of the station, ending up in the designated place where he was going to meet his… to meet…

To meet his boss. The man. Leader? Also, a colleague. Who wasn’t Pietro. Because Sergei was a detective — Bucky was, too.

Who the fuck was Bucky, though?

Sergei whined low in his throat and dragged himself across the lunarcrete floor of the windowless room so that he could huddle behind a stack of crates in the corner. His head hurt. His heart hurt. His everything was painful, and his mind felt sluggish with parasitic thoughts.

There were protocols in place that had been drilled into his mind years ago — he remembered years ago, he remembered being… in the military, he remembered being sat in a detective academy classroom, entry-level job in government, piloting lessons, an asteroid. Disjointed memories and recollections superimposed, layers upon layers of events and thoughts of both him — Sergei? — and that guy, that Bucky guy.

Sergei looked down at the floor, hands clutching his hair and tugging, as if that small amount of pain would help settle his thoughts.

He remembered how someone had told him to take one thought at a time. He didn’t know if that voice came from Sergei’s life or Bucky’s. “In my mind, there is a door.” He felt his eyes prickle and a single tear well up. “There is a door so small, one thought only can go through.” He felt the tear roll down his nose and plick onto the dusty ground. He sniffed. What was the rest of that mantra, god damnit? “I open the door and close it fast. What…”

He sniffed again, eyes still downcast and looking at the little black dot of dampness on the grey, dusty concrete.

_What is the thought?_

“There are two people inside me,” he whispered in a hushed voice.

There were two people. He knew. He felt it. The pain at the back of his head flared, an ice-pick and a fire-hot brand at the same time, but it couldn’t really erase the sensation that a voice, belonging to… to that Bucky guy? Was yelling, faint, indistinct, inarticulate, at the back of his mind.

“I,” Sergei hesitated, and repeated the door mantra silently, then continued, “I open the door and close it fast. There is a thought. There—” He choked up and new tears welled up, together with a combination of pain from the blackbox and a difficulty managing his thoughts. “I knew him.” He sniffled again. “Oh god, I know him but I don’t.”

Sergei breathed deeply, trying to stave off any other thoughts, and took out his phone to check the time. He’d sent an encrypted signal to his handler —that’s what the people he worked for were — and estimated that he still had at least ten minutes to get his thoughts back in order. His implant hurt, it hurt so much.

Sergei. He needed to be Sergei. Not listen to the man in the corner of his mind. He was a — soldier, spy, detective, agent, _agent_ — he wiped off the tears and scrubbed his left hand over his face, then stood up. There would be questions; he needed to report on his failure to get information on and from the target. He was an operative. Had been for years. He had emigrated from Russia to Space for this, right? He had… missions.

Sergei shook his head, as if he could shake off those stray thoughts. As if he could forget about his patchy memories, the holes in his life, and the voice at the back of his mind.

Nine minutes left or so.

He spent them pacing around the room and slowly carving a groove in the concrete floor. His head hurt and the location of his blackbox implant felt like a ring of fire, branded on the back of his skull. What the fuck had that Laufeyson guy done to it? At some point, Sergei ran down a list of all the highlights of his life, as if to reassure himself that he was a real person. He mumbled his place of birth, the names of his parents, Yelena, the date of his immigration, that day he looked out the space station windows for the first time, his sister Yelena, that girl he had met back before this job. Her hair, her name, her hobbies. The day he got assigned his mission. He was a spy. For the government. Yes. Sergei Smerdyakov, spy, agent; he liked nights out, beer, the sea.

_It's experimental. You’ll see._

Everything felt real, he’d known those people, those places. It all was disjointed, yes, and didn’t mesh with the foggy feeling that… _I knew him_.

Sergei swallowed down the bile that was rising in his throat. He needed to be calm. To focus. They were going to debrief him. This was neither the place nor the time to have an existential crisis.

He was as calm as he could get when he heard steps in the corridor and the scrape of the heavy door being pushed open. Sergei looked at the newcomer, more of a shadow cut into the light of the hallway than a man.

“Agent. _New orders_ ,” the man said, and peace fell upon his chaotic thoughts like a blanket of snow.

“ **R** eady **T** o **C** omply.”

The man stepped into the room and looked him over. He looked at the man, waiting for orders.

“You sent out an emergency signal. Report.”

“The target was identified and I made contact with him. However.” However.

However…

He heard someone whisper to him, a murmur so low he could barely discern the words. He felt like he shouldn’t say… something.

“However?” the man prompted him.

“However. I. The target attacked me. I managed to get away.” His natural position was parade rest, but he felt a wave of awareness of his body, as if some part of himself was slowly awakening. He — who was he anyway? — he. “Evade. Regroup. New orders,” he gritted out in a clipped tone.

The man approached further and stopped some paces away, tilting his head. He looked at the man, his goatee, the white hair at his temples, those piercing eyes, and felt that blanket of snow at war with an inner turmoil he couldn’t control. Mostly, he felt, and feeling was **against orders**.

_Alexander Lukin._

Lukin waved a hand and somebody else entered the room. Another man, white, a thin scar running from his chin to his lip.

“Rollins, we need to bag that asshole. He’s already thwarted our plans twice, and now he attacked the Agent. That evidence isn’t easy to get hold of, and it’s even harder to fudge the attached records.”

Serg— Buck— e. He shook his head to get rid of the uneasiness, all the while listening — no, waiting for orders — no, he needed to listen, take notes.

Rollins eyed him up and down, his jaw working, which cast his hollow cheeks into even sharper contrast under the low light of the room.

“Comissionner Lukin. I think there’s something wrong with his override chip.”

Lukin sneered and walked the remaining two steps to B— Ser— to him, to him. He felt the tight grip of Lukin’s hand on his face, forcing him to turn his head to the side so he could be inspected. Like chattel. Like looking at a horse’s teeth. He stared blankly at the cobwebs in the dark corner of the room as Lukin’s fingers dug painfully into his cheeks, grinding the soft flesh inside his mouth into his teeth.

“Huh. Skin looks irritated and the port has some scratches, dried blood too. You might be right, Rollins.” Lukin let his face go and stepped back towards the crates in the corner of the room, looking deep in thought.

He looked on and kept parade rest. He was a soldier, he thought. In front of him, Rollins assumed parade rest, too.

In the silence offered by Lukin’s pondering, Sergei had a sudden moment of clarity. Rollins looked at him, and he looked at Rollins, and he thought…

Bucky thought that, fuck, whatever had happened to him, maybe this wasn’t Lukin’s first shot at puppetry.

Lukin clapped his hands and he felt calm again, dispassionate, waiting, a statue. “Very well. Rollins, reset Barnes’ blackbox, we can’t have him malfunctioning until he finishes serving his purpose.” Rollins nodded and Bucky — oh my god, he was Bucky, they were going to erase him again and he couldn’t move, he couldn’t —

Lukin took a data key out of his pocket. “Reset, then we’ll have him go after that harpy Romanova. After this, we should have enough to sway popular opinion, maybe flip some key government officials against those abhorrent transhumanists…” Bucky, Sergei, he doesn’t know, he stops listening, because Rollins is now fast approaching and he just can’t move.

He can’t move.

Rollins’ hands approached his neck.

A man was standing in front of him, goatee, white hair at the temples, piercing eyes.

“You have _new orders_.”

He nodded. “ **R** eady **T** o **C** omply.”

They gave him a file.

* * *

“Steve, are you sure?”

Steve could see in Sam’s eyes that he was reluctant to leave him, compounded by the fact that he was leaving him with _Loki,_ of all people.

“I’m sure. Bucky is around, and I need to find him. But we need to warn Phillips, give him everything we have on SAF and Lukin.”

Sam sighed heavily and hugged Steve tight. “Okay, jackass. Just try not to get… hurt. Kidnapped. Catapulted into space. Or… whatever.”

Steve gave back as good as he got with the hug. “Will do. I’ll come to you as soon as I get Bucky back.” They released their hold on one another, and Steve beamed at Sam. “Good luck waking Phillips up in the wee hours of the morning just to tell him he has to cool his heels and wait for us to come to him.”

“You think you’re funny.” Sam shook his head and turned to leave. “See you soon, man.”

He’d given Sam his badge number and the encryption key to his life-vault — which was just a simple file in the colony mainframe registering whether a citizen was alive or dead — hoping that Phillips would hold on to it and reactivate it on Steve’s behalf once he needed to be… brought back from the dead.

Steve shivered, feeling the loss of Sam’s hug like the absence of a coat in winter. And yet, for all that Sam’s hugs were fantastic…

He wanted Bucky. But as Loki had explained, right now, Bucky didn’t know him. He hated thinking of Sam as “the next best thing,” but he really, really was the closest thing to comfort that Steve had outside of Bucky.

Plus, he gave the best hugs.

Steve watched Sam go down the street; it might have been four in the morning, but neons lit up the whole place as if it were full of daytime colours. Steve closed his eyes and focused on the small buzzing of the surveillance cameras. Maybe he could scramble their signal. Maybe he could cover his friend’s exit from the segment. He didn’t know if that was in his new array of powers, but one could hope. He was only going on a hunch born from his cobbled together memories of his panicked walk through the colony and Sam watching a news report about surveillance cameras being on the fritz or cycling through loops of empty street footage, cause unknown.

“Well, that’s interesting.” Loki interrupted his train of thought in the blandest of tones.

Steve looked at him, half-shadowed in the entryway of the building, eyes and hair glowing in the semi-darkness and felt… tired. “What is?”

Loki started walking down the street as he answered, Steve falling into step beside him. “Your use of wipeout. Seems like the effects are different on you than on me.” Loki pointed at the cameras. “You scrambled them, didn’t you?’

“Oh.” Steve looked up and tried to focus back on the sound of the surrounding devices… which had changed, sounded more like muted white noise, now. “Sounds like I did, yeah. It’s different for you? How so?” Steve steered clear of a person in overalls emblazoned with “SALVAGE WORK” across the front and back. Above them, the two halves of the street “ceiling” slowly came together, and they were soon walking inside one of those famous spaceport tunnels.

“My implants fused with my body. Did yours, too?”

Steve remembered the fine lines of his vertebral brace on the shoddy x-ray he had done during his escape. Those white lines, like a root system, branching into his body. He shivered. “Yeah, mine too.”

“Fascinating.” Loki pointed to the mouth of a narrow alleyway on the left side of the street, behind a shop offering small home appliances. “Over there.” They entered the alley, dark, damp and so full of power lines snaking across the walls that the brickwork was nearly indiscernible. “I have absolute control over my implants now; a proper improvement. My strength, stamina, and overall health have improved, I think.”

“Yeah, me too.” Steve waited as Loki pushed a door open, then unlocked a series of barred security curtains. “It's actually pretty rad. I managed to burst out of the military prison thanks to that. Looks like the military had no idea that it had this effect on people.”

Loki rolled up the last metal curtain. “That’s no wonder. They funded us, but those stupid berks couldn’t be arsed with listening to our progress reviews. Mind you, we might be the only two subjects alive, they can’t help not having a proper statistical sample…” He clicked the light on in a grey hallway, littered with rubbish and old, decrepit appliances. “After you.”

“Where to?”

“Straight ahead, up the stairs, last floor.”

Steve heard Loki closing all the doors and metal curtains behind him as he made his way through yet another narrow, enclosed space. At some point, he passed a tag demanding “peace and equality for cybs.”

“So, can you hear the machines?” Steve asked.

He heard both Loki’s steps catching up to him quickly and the soft whine of his implants. “Hear? Hmmm, not… really? However, my sight seems to have improved a lot and I see… new colours. Electronics emit a strange stygian blue colour. I mean, I know electricity is a flux of corpuscles and thus can be considered a wave, but I never would have thought that…”

Steve reached the first landing and glanced at Loki with a raised eyebrow. “Remember, I’m a detective, not a scientist,” he interrupted drily.

Loki pointed up. “Go on. Also, detective, you shouldn’t wallow in ignorance. It’s crass.”

Steve snorted and resumed climbing the stairs. Some landings had closed doors, others opened onto tunnels or hallways. Graffiti was more and more frequent, most of it referring to cyborg rights.

“Okay, so you can see electronics, I can hear them. What else… uhm.”

“I can disappear. Manipulate visual feeds.”

“That’s why we saw you disappear on those tapes…”

“And why your dear lad, Bucky, lost sight of me when he was chasing me on the rooftops.”

Steve stopped again. “What…”

Loki tapped the corner of his right eye with a long index finger. “He was wearing augmented goggles.”

Steve snorted and resumed climbing. “Fuck… Dernier said cloaking, huh. Makes sense.” He climbed another flight of stairs. “It seems I can scramble signals.”

“Taking my powers into account, that would only be logical.”

“I heal quickly,” Steve said.

Loki nodded. They both stopped at the last landing, where a door with no handle welcomed them. Loki walked up to the right-hand wall and brushed his hand over an old poster, then unstuck it from the wall and pushed a button that had been previously hidden by a dumb PSA advertisement against consumerism.

“Wipeout dissolves bullets.”

That stalled Loki. The door unlocked in a succession of noisy sounds of bolts and latches, but all his attention was focused on Steve, his medusa hair alight, those strange neon eyes fixed on him. “What do you mean?”

“I was shot. I managed to get a good look at my wound, and it looked weird…”

Loki nodded, his eyes keen, as if fascinated. “Yeah, covered in blood and alive with metamaterial aggregates, right?”

“I got hold of a field x-ray scanner and saw what was going on” — he gestured at his midriff — “in there. The bullet was reduced to bits and pieces, I could barely see it on the scan.”

“Huh.” Loki looked taken aback, for once. “Riveting.” And only Loki could say that word and sound both truly riveted and also completely sarcastic about it. He turned to the door and opened it. “Well, I should have thought about that. In any case, welcome to my commune’s secured flat.”

Steve entered Loki’s lair. His den of iniquity. His flat.

What Steve had expected, he didn’t know. Ever since he had found Loki perched on Bucky’s lap, his brain had decided that, surely, Loki could be nothing less than… an evil son of a bitch, maybe. A duplicitous snake? His place should have been a cave, damp, maybe with a whole wall devoted to… plans of the honeypot kind?

Instead, the flat was strangely homey, on the nondescript side. Like all flats in seg one, it was small and utilitarian, but it looked new, or at least well kept. There was a beige sofa in the middle of the room facing a bare wall with a small coffee table pushed against it, full of what looked like metal samples and techie stuff. The kitchen was small, open plan, no chairs, no table, only a little bit of counter space to eat at. At the end of the room, in front of Steve, were two closed doors, most likely the bathroom and, what a luxury, a separate bedroom.

Steve walked further into the room, only vaguely listening to Loki wondering aloud about wipeout’s properties and its ability to eat up a bullet. There was a small bookshelf to the side of the coffee table. He picked up a framed photograph, absentmindedly checking it out.

Loki’s eyes stared back at him, his face smiling, not smirking. His hair, sans implants, was adorned with a cute silver hair clip, and he was pressed against someone Steve was well acquainted with. Thor was pressing a kiss to the underside of Loki’s jaw, looking happy, smitten, in love. The whole affair looked spontaneous, lovely.

Innocently beautiful.

Steve heard Loki’s implants get louder, hissier, so he put the picture frame down and looked over his shoulder. Loki stared at him with unreadable eyes, then came up and grabbed the frame and laid it facedown on the bookshelf.

“Sorry,” said Steve, unsure of what to do. He thought he needed to apologise, but for what, and how… “I know he’s your boyf—” Loki’s forbidding air made him stop talking.

Loki sidestepped him and made as if he was arranging the bookshelf, putting things back in order, pushing a potted plant more to the left, a book and a data file case more to the right. “So, you can bed down on the sofa. Door on the left is the shower and the loo.” He retreated towards the kitchen, leaving Steve at a loss for what to say. “I go out everyday on a random schedule to avoid patterns. I have duties to the commune and local union in exchange for this flat, so whatever scrutiny we might attract can’t fall back onto the union. You can come and go as you please since we both basically can evade station-wide surveillance, but do be careful at all times…”

Steve frowned. He felt as if he needed to push Loki to talk about Thor, but also that maybe Bucky wouldn’t have pushed. “Yes, okay. I aim to canvass the segment slowly to try and find Bucky again, anyways.” He deliberately rounded the couch to get closer to Loki. He decided on pushing. “Thank you for your help. Thor was right in pointing me tow—”

Loki banged his hands down on his small counter, stopping Steve dead in his tracks. “Listen, mate. You like your men angsty-sweet and brainwashed? Fine. I like them ready to choose me over everything else. When you reached out, your man fled and you’re a sucker for punishment so you’re going after him? Good for you,” Loki snarled. “When I reached out, Thor had a _duty_ , and _obligations_. He fled, too.” Loki stood back up and gestured at himself with a flourish. “And look at me, having a life, being less desperate than you. Please do me the fucking pleasure of never saying his name again.”

And with that dramatic request out of the way, he stalked out of the room and through his own bedroom door.

Steve stood speechless for a little while before he sat down on the sofa.

Well, at least now he knew that the wipeout had not fixed his inability to get people to talk without grating on their nerves.

* * *

He was in a room, cold, with two men.

He was on the street, prowling towards the target location. _Romanova, Romanova, **Romanova**_ …

Sergei was confused; he had a shift to get to. But he wasn’t a bartender, right? Who is Bucky?

He stopped in a hidden access path between two buildings.

He had a mission.

He was investigating.

He had a target, a shift, a file, where was he? Who was the man in the doorway?

His head hurt. He hurt so much, it felt…

* * *

Like a yell in the night.

Saying that it was the sudden inhuman screaming in his head that woke Steve up would imply that Steve had been sleeping, which he had not been. Steve had been staring at the ceiling in silence, listening to electronic noise, lying on the sofa, trying to tell his brain that worrying about Bucky instead of sleeping was useless because he needed all of his sleep in order to be able to chase him down efficiently.

Loki hadn’t emerged from his room since he had slammed the door behind him two hours ago, so Steve had thought that trying to sleep was a good idea, especially since the clock in his head told him that it was six thirty-seven in the a.m., way past time for him to get some shut-eye.

At first, it had just been another noise added to the cacophony in his head, blending in with the staticky whale song of the mainframe, the muffled buzz of Loki’s implants and nearby appliances, sundry whirrs, and various electrical thrummings. But the noise got clearer. Louder. Harsher. A stutter, and a scream.

Steve’s eyes opened wide and he sat up.

“Bucky,” he whispered to no one in particular.

Before he could think twice, he vaulted over the back of the sofa and was out the door, taking the stairs two by two. In his head, in his ears, the sound had swelled to become a breathless cry, full of static and distortion. Steve skidded to a halt on the last landing before the ground floor and listened.

He took off running down the decrepit hallway instead of the stairs, following that sound. He jumped into another stairwell, down another corridor, barged through the back of a shop and dodged an irate shopkeeper, ducking out into the street.

Here, he turned around slowly, eyes nearly closed, and orienting himself with the noises surrounding him. He heard the wailing and got his bearings, directing his steps towards it. Sometimes, he felt the beady eye of a surveillance camera, and half in a daze, he simply thought about muting the camera’s noise, jumbling it together with the sensation of snow falling. Whatever he was doing, he thought it was effective; he didn’t know how, nor did he care.

Because Bucky was close, he could hear it.

A sudden spike in the distorted yells made him wince. He opened his eyes all the way and saw the door to a brothel. Next to the brothel, there was a back alley, dark, damp and filthy. He slowly made his way to the mouth of the alley and closed his eyes again. The sound came from somewhere over the alley. He looked around and saw a downspout running up the side of the building. Alrighty, then.

Steve thanked his lucky stars that his body had been enhanced by the wipeout, because these kinds of gymnastics would not have ended well for him, before. He climbed the vertical pipe and reached an open window. He fell into the corridor clumsily; he could hear people chatting nearby.

And the yell, ebbing and flowing. After silently padding through hallways for a while, he finally found a door, ajar, and he knew that this was it.

Bucky.

Apart from electrical hums and the intermittent screams that he could perceive right inside his brain, no sound was coming from the room.

Steve stepped up to the door.

“Bucky?” he called, hoping no one would hear him aside from — less than a second later, he heard a whimper.

Steve pushed the door open.

“Bucky?” he whispered, when he saw his friend standing there alone in the room, facing a desk. The room looked like the office of the madame or monsieur of the brothel, with shelves, a desk, impressive chairs, a board with all the names of the dancers and their stage names…

Bucky didn’t turn around to face him. The line of his shoulders under his bomber looked tense, his neck and his back, ramrod straight. He looked… stuck in parade rest, papers in a sleeve stamped with “Natasha Romanova” held in his left hand and a gun in his gloved right hand.

A fucking gun.

What the fuck.

“Bucky?’

Bucky turned towards him, and now that Steve was face-to-face with him for real and not when he was hidden under a half-naked Loki, he could see how his friend was… different.

Bucky’s jaw worked a bit before he managed to say something. “Not mission… relevant.” Steve stood petrified, looking at Bucky’s blue eyes, a more vivid shade of blue than before, looking at the frown lines etched deep in his forehead, at his face, strained with… exertion? Pain? Puzzlement? At those implants, so very alien on his face.

“Do you know me?” he asked in the softest of voices.

Bucky shook his head. “No. No nonono,” and stopped, wincing — and that was clearly pain on his face, clear as day, and pain in the scream Steve could hear coming from him.

Bucky was screaming without even having to open his mouth.

Steve took one infinitesimal step closer. “Are you hurt?” He was straining not to simply jump across the room to Bucky and embrace him.

“No.” Bucky frowned, perplexed. “Yes? Ow…” His features projected a much more human display of emotion, and he looked angry, all of a sudden. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” He sounded different, and even had an accent.

 _Not Bucky, then._ “I’m… I heard some noise. You sounded like you were in pain?” Steve half-lied, unsure how to proceed.

“Cукаблядь,” Not-Bucky exclaimed and brought his hand to his neck. The hand came back bloody, and he looked at it, first in puzzlement, and then in horror. “Steve?”

“Bucky?” Steve exhaled, choked up.

Bucky looked at him, then, and this was Bucky, it was him, and he was panicking. Same eyes, same mouth, same nose, same terrified stare they had shared months or a lifetime ago, sure that death was going to do them fucking part.

“Oh fucking hell, Buck…” Steve threw himself at his friend. “Bucky, oh mother of fucks I—” Steve choked tears back, squeezing Bucky and then remembered that his strength had increased dramatically so maybe he should… dial it down.

Bucky stayed still, more of a wooden board than anything. “Steve.” Steve heard his voice crack from where he had hidden his face in the creases of the jacket. “Am I finally dead now?” Steve felt a hand stroke his back, light as a feather, hesitant, there and gone immediately.

Steve let go of Bucky, just a little, and stared into his friend’s eyes. The yells and screams were now much quieter. “No, you’re not dead,” Steve said.

“But you are.”

Steve laughed bitterly through the tears that threatened to fall and smiled. He brought his hands up to Bucky’s jaw, “I surviv—”

His hands hadn’t even made contact with Bucky’s face when Bucky wrenched himself violently away. “Отвечай, сука?!” He threw the papers on the floor and trained the weapon he still had in hand on the middle of Steve’s chest. “Who are you?!”

Steve tried to placate this… person… who seemed to inhabit Bucky’s body. Was _this_ Sergei? “I’m Steve!“ Holy shit, he hoped nobody else was around. “I’m Steve Rogers. I’m—” Holy shit, Bucky was pointing a gun at him. Oh mama, what should he do?

”Rogers?”

“Yes. I’m… Steve Rogers.”

“You don’t sound so sure, _Rogers_.” Sergei froze for a second then shook his head. “Not target,” he enunciated calmly, features blank. “Mission parameters have — who — hey, Steve — get out of —”

Bucky’s grip on the gun went more and more slack as the noise from his implants glitched more and more. Steve, still so close and still in point blank range, used that momentary distraction to grab the weapon, pulling it out of Bucky’s hand. He moved away to put it on the desk, under the confused eyes of his friend, who looked first at the desk and then at his empty hand, and the simple fact that he could get the gun away without Bucky or not-Bucky being able to figure it out broke his heart.

Again.

Steve sniffed and got close to him. “Bucky?” he tried, without much hope. What had they done to him? “What the fuck have they done to you?”

Blank-Bucky ended up taking over and bent down to retrieve the paper file that had fallen from his hand earlier. “ _New orders_. **R** eady **T** o **C** omply,” he said robotically.

“What are those orders?”

Blank-Bucky handed over the file and a data key he had in his jacket pocket, which also had “Romanova” written on it, and Steve took it. Could it be this simple? “What’s your name?”

Blank-Bucky looked at him, uncomprehending “что за мысли такие?...” The blankness slowly bled into bafflement. “I.”

Steve held his breath.

“I don’t know?”

Steve couldn’t even hear his own broken whimper under the wave of white noise coming from Bucky’s glitching implants.

“Steve?”

“Yes.”

“Please, help me.”

And then Bucky fainted.

* * *

Steve’s luck really had run out around the time he’d managed to freefall through the spacefield and latch onto the cargo ship without careening into the void. Or maybe it was later, when he had found Sam. Because having Bucky run away from him and then finding him again in the throes of a breakdown weren’t events he would qualify as fortuitous. Maybe unhappy accidents, at best.

So, it was no wonder that as soon as he’d gathered eighty kilograms of inanimate Buckyness in his arms, a woman would barge into the office and interrupt him.

She immediately took a fighting stance, while Steve stood frozen like a rabbit in front of a tram. “Who are you?” she barked and raised her hands, her fingertips crackling with electric arcs.

Oh, wow.

“Those are class six illegal weaponised impl—”

The woman clenched her fists and then released them quickly, creating bigger arcs, and filling Steve’s sense of technopathy with the intuition of impending danger. “Answer me, or I’ll—”

Bucky moaned.

Steve looked down, every nerve in his body sending distress signals of the “Bucky is in pain” variety.

“Detective Barnes?”

Steve gaped. “You know Bucky?”

She frowned, and her stance, which she had relaxed upon seeing Bucky, went rigid and threatening again. “What did you do to him? He’s an officer, you—”

“I’m an officer, too.”

She snapped her fingers and new crackles of electricity arced through the air, closer to Steve.

Steve gathered Bucky closer to him, holding his head against Steve’s neck protectively. “My name is Steve Rogers, he was my partner, he’s in pain and he has been set up. Please.” He didn’t know what he was begging for. Help? Escape? Both?

The crackling of her fingertips dimmed progressively. “Set up?”

Steve nodded quickly, and then pushed the paper file that had fallen onto the floor with his right foot. “And I think you were being framed.”

She quickly crouched down to pick it up, and her eyes widened when she saw the name on the file. Steve had guessed right, this woman was Romanova, then. He watched as she leafed through the file, and saw when her eyes turned to the gun Steve had put on the large desk beside him.

“So, your Bucky…” What was it with people saying Bucky was his? “He was the one with this file? He was supposed to frame me for conspiring to kill an officer?”

How supervillainish could Lukin get? Very, it seemed.

“Look, Romanova, Bucky isn’t in his right mind right now. He doesn’t even answer to his own name, I’ve been investigating this, and I can tell you this wasn’t Bucky’s doing, this was ordered by—”

“Aleksander Lukin?” Steve gaped like a fish. Who the fuck was this woman? “Don’t look at me like that, My Name is Steve Rogers, detective Rumlow is a regular here and I’ve heard him rant about his boss often enough to know how unsavoury the man is. Half the spaceport unions are keeping their ears to the tracks because Aleksander Lukin stopped surveilling trafficking months, maybe years ago, and we had to pick up the slack.” She pointed at Bucky with the file. “Is that a spookybox?”

Steve looked down at Bucky, whose face was tucked completely into his neck now, dozing in a painful slumber. His neck was exposed, and the blackbox location looked red, inflamed and crusted over with blood. Steve looked at Romanova. “That’s a blackbox.” She snorted and went to retrieve the gun. “Moving shipments? Wait, no, don’t touch that… that’s evidence.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Evidence against me?”

Steve shook his head and hauled Bucky back up against him, as his limp body had begun to slip. “Evidence is evidence. It’s just a piece of the puzzle.” Romanova didn’t answer but left the gun where it was. “Are you gonna let us leave?”

She hummed thoughtfully, looking at them both, one unconscious, the other exhausted. “What do I do with all this?” She waved the file at the gun.

“Call my commissioner.” He rattled off Phillips’ phone number and thought that maybe he’d be better off running away on some scientific expedition headed for Titan, just to avoid Phillips’ wrath at having his sleep interrupted, getting information unceremoniously dumped in his lap, and then fielding a call from a brothel madame at seven o’clock in the morning. The world order dictated that Phillips was the one to interrupt their sleep, not the other way around.

She didn’t answer, just looked at him piercingly for a long moment, while Steve listened to Bucky’s laboured breathing. Then she finally nodded and pointed at the door. “Back door is down the hall, take the first left, then left again through the dressing rooms.”

When Steve reached the back door and pushed through it into the alleyway outside, he sighed in relief. He walked down a set of rickety stairs and finally reached street level, where he paused to briefly hide his face in Bucky’s curls, breathing in the sour tang of fear-induced sweat and the smell of Bucky’s shampoo. For the shortest moment, that strange mix of scents and the quiet whine of his implant revving back up overwhelmed Steve. Everything hurt in a dull way, his head felt woozy, and his right shoulder stung for no reason.

Hoisting Bucky back up into a bridal carry, he walked down to the end of the alley and turned onto the main street. Unseen, a bulky shadow detached itself from the darkness he had just vacated.

* * *

Loki was alerted to the fact that Steve had come back to the flat when the door banged closed. He was not huddled in his bed trying to gather some will to live. He was not. Fuck Steve. Fuck Thor. Fuck this godforsaken colony and its veneer of perfection that was only skin deep. Fuck all of this and the scheming and the cloak and dagger shite he’d gotten thrown into.

Loki raised a hand in the semi-darkness of his room and looked at it, at the soft stygian blue light in the middle of his palm. That electronic chip had been implanted mostly to enhance his sense of touch, and now it was… like a softly glowing, impossible colour his brain sometimes had trouble analysing.

There was a crash from the living room.

Oh, that arsehole had better not be destroying his kitchen.

Loki roused himself, inspected the tidy piles of evidence he’d intercepted whenever possible from the copper wankers who had tailed him, and smiled to himself.

Maybe he wasn’t enough for Thor. Maybe that life and all the others after this one were shite. But he was still here, now, and he still had all his spite, and that was enough.

When Loki opened the door, though, he nearly blew a gasket. Because Steve was not alone, oh boy, no, he was not. There was Steve and whoever the bloody fuck that guy was on his sofa, a broken glass of water on the floor, and a bloodstained rag in his hands.

Sergei — or Bucky, but really, who cared? — was bleeding sluggishly from his blackbox implant site, which was, first, frankly worrying, and second, a bit rude, coming from a guest.

“Rogers!” Loki gasped in indignation.

At the noise, Whoever von Nonameson looked up at him, his face contorted into an unmistakable grimace of pain which quickly morphed into anger. He tried to rise from the couch but was stopped by Steve. “You attacked me!” he yelled.

“Oh pish, Sergei.” Loki rolled his eyes axis-ward. “I’m sure you were just chomping at the bit to gut me, you swine.”

The man growled, and ah, yes, well, that’s why Loki had been so enthusiastic in trying to seduce him, but also, he was very much taken by blondie over there so Loki just smiled and didn’t let himself shiver in delight.

“Sergei?” Steve said in the strangest of voices.

“What?” Sergei asked aggressively.

Steve just raised his hands in surrender.

Then Sergei winced. Loki could see the light coming from his implants and the one acting like a faulty blackbox — Loki was more and more convinced that that bloody thing must be a darkbox — was emitting a hyper-red glow, almost painful to look at. The light was slowly dimming.

“We really need to get that implant looked at.”

Steve, still huddled in a corner of the sofa and looking dejected, was busy trying to hide his mountain of hurt, so he didn’t notice Sergei reaching behind his neck and then bringing his hand back into view, covered in blood.

“Steve?” _Oh god, here we go again._

Steve turned to Bucky with tremulous hope in his eyes. “Buck?” Then his eyes zeroed in on his hand. “Holy fucking shit.” It looked like he wanted to reach out to Bucky’s neck, but he suddenly stopped, his hands hovering awkwardly in the space between him and that soft, suffering boy.

Okay, Loki was so over this load of bollocks, thank you very much.

“Okay, get up, the both of you.” He took out his phone, typed Shuri’s address in, and sent it to Steve’s number. “You’re going to get blood all over the upholstery. And then I’ll have to set fire to it, and then to _you_ for making me sacrifice my good sofa.”

Steve looked at his phone, his other hand having landed on Bucky’s arm. Bucky was currently looking dazedly between the white-knuckle grip that Steve had on his arm and at his own bloody hand. His neck looked aglow with that painful red-hued aura, so maybe that was Sergei again. It looked like Bucky wasn’t really home, anymore.

“Who is this?”

“Shuri. Best implanter in the station. She’s in tunnel sixteen, you can’t miss the spot.” Steve looked distracted for a second, his eyes going unfocused. Surely focusing on whatever sound equated to the ghastly glow that Loki was perceiving. By all that was alive in space, those two idiots were walking disasters. “Say that you’re sorry for the inconvenience, but you have a toaster to repair. They’ll send you to her.”

“Thank you.” Steve appeared grateful and a bit overwhelmed, and, oh blimey, was this an emotion? Loki sidestepped him and hurried to the kitchen to make himself a pot of tea.

As he was pouring water and trying to eavesdrop on the human-cyborg disasters in his living room, there was a knock on his door.

Loki startled, which sent his pot flying.

No one knocked on his door, because it was a hidey-hole, secure, set up deep inside a labyrinthine building. The commune had offered this one when Loki had come to them back in April, bloodied and afraid for his life. Loki felt his implants flare up, because the wipeout had kind of made all of his implants obsolete, so now they just… lit up randomly in colours that only he could see and reflected his emotions like a giant moodring. The strands of optical fibres in his hair turned an ice-cold blue of their own accord.

“What the fuck did you do?” he whisper-shouted to Steve, who just shook his head. Whoever was at the door, this could only be the good detective’s fault, or his glitchy friend’s. “Did someone follow you?”

Steve put a hand on Sergei’s shoulder and tried to get in front of him, which Loki supposed was meant to shield Sergei, but really only emphasized Steve’s thin build. Sergei looked like a yeti hiding behind a birch sapling. “I was pretty _preoccupied_ on our way back here. So maybe someone tailed me, I don’t know, I had to carry Bucky, it’s not easy being inconspicuous with someone in a bridal carry!”

“A bridal ca— Are you—? What the fuck kind of detective are you, this is like playing trumpet in a violin concert!” Loki approached his door and wished desperately for a way to look through walls.

“I investigate murders! Oh my god! The people I’m interested in are dead!” Steve cried loudly, and Loki tried to shut him up with desperate shushing noises. Steve continued whisper-shouting angrily, “Sorry, I’m still new at the whole fugitive thing, asshole.”

“Loki!” an all-too-familiar voice called from the corridor.

Oh, dear.

Loki turned towards Steve, and waved his arms around, as Thor’s voice boomed again outside his bloody fucking door. “Loki, I know you’re there. I have a tracer on, and I know you’re behind that door.” Loki continued gesturing, trying to get the fucking circus act to flee to the other room. To his horror, Steve did nothing of the sort and just started patting himself all over, finding a pin-sized tracer stuck in his right shoulder. “Rogers!” Fuck. Thor really _had_ followed those disasters up to his doorstep.

“There’s a window in my room, we need to get out!” He gestured wildly to the bedroom door.

Steve mouthed, “But he’s on our side?” like an absolute _dingus_ and did absolutely nothing to remove his arse from the premises. Loki was going to set fire to that man in less than two seconds.

Loki pushed the two numbnuts towards his room and scoffed. “Our side. Just wait until—”

“Loki, I’ll break this door down!” came Thor’s muffled voice.

“OH NO, YOU WON’T!”

“I heard you!”

“Of course you heard me, you twat!”

“So do we escape or…?” Sergei asked Steve in bafflement.

Loki stomped up to the door and opened it.

Loki heard Steve say something like, “Looks like we aren’t?” but he was too preoccupied with the hulking mass of his ex-boyfriend darkening his doorstep.

“You have some goddamned nerve.” Thor tried to smile, but it was strained and short-lived because Loki grabbed his collar, looked left and right up and down the corridor, and then pulled him inside before closing the door.

“Loki.” Thor’s muscle enhancement implants were like strands of gold and his shining mass was just as unbearable to look at as the last time they had seen each other. Thor smiled and it… it actually pained Loki.

“Don’t say you missed me.”

“But…” Thor looked at him, and his gaze was just as wonderingly admiring as always. He stared, he admired, and Loki had always basked in that. “But I did. Miss you.”

Loki’s eyes slid to the side, watching Steve and Sergei standing in the corner of the room, half-curious about the drama and half-engrossed by their own drama. Steve’s light was still mostly a muted hyper blue, no worries, and Sergei — or Bucky — looked like the pain had receded.

Loki mentally changed gears and focused all his attention back on Thor, who at least looked a bit sheepish. “I missed you,” he repeated and Loki didn’t even bother smothering his disgusted “Ugh.” But then Thor’s words just kept spilling out. “Look, Loki, I know we parted on bad terms but—”

“Bad terms? Bad. Terms?” Loki exclaimed as he threw his arms around, pissed and gobsmacked. “You call what you said to me bad terms?!”

“Listen, Loki—”

But no, no, Loki was not going to listen. He blindly grabbed the first thing at hand — which was actually a mug — and threw it at Thor’s face.

Thor dodged, winced, and then bloody well kept talking, because in all the years they had been and not been together, that stupid twit had never learned to shut up.

“Okay, no placating you, sorry.” Thor raised his hands in a fucking placating gesture. And _only now_ that gnat remembered the rules? “Uhhhhh. I apologise.” Oh my god, scratching that, had he forgotten all the rules? All the things they had said and laid down between them to make this work, way back when Loki’s life hadn’t gone to shit yet.

Loki let out a strangled sound, feeling like he was being smothered by his own rage. His luminous strands of hair were now an aggressive yellow and pointed at Thor like hissing snakes in Medusa’s mane.

“Uh, shit, uh, wait, I’m…” Thor visibly took a breath, closing his eyes. Was he calming himself? Well, Loki sure hoped so, because he, for one, was not cooling off in any way. “Okay so, no apologising, I… shit, not making it about me. Uh.” Thor took another breath and Loki moved to the kitchen to grab another mug. After a long, silent moment, only interrupted by the hushed voices of Bucky and Steve, Thor croaked out a broken, “I messed up.” He peered up at Loki, eyes a bit wet.

A bit wide.

A bit emotional.

Loki was having none of it.

He sniffed disdainfully. “Oh, blimey, that’s pure shame, what did you mess up?”

Thor licked his lips nervously. “Listen, Loki, I’m not comfortable with having an… audience for this, okay?”

“We can go…” Steve squeaked out while Bucky-Sergei stared blankly at a wall, neck enveloped in a hyper-red haze.

“Yes.” Thor said, right when Loki snarled “No. You stay. And you, I want to see you squirm while you say sorry. Go on.”

Thor actually squirmed for real at the idea of having to fess up in public, and this unwound Loki’s anger just the tiniest bit. “I was insensitive, I said you were a paranoid douche.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “Bollocks. I **am** paranoid. Is that all you think you did to me? Fucking try harder.”

“Loki, please,” Thor pleaded, then had to dodge the second mug that Loki threw at his face, spitting and snarling. “Okay! Okay, please! Loki! I turned your illnesses against you, I belittled you!” And this, actually, was not appeasing Loki, he felt enraged, he felt beside himself, he felt like his face was on fire with all the fury that was boiling over.

“The! Exact! Words!” Because nothing in their tortuous love life had ever cut more than this one, and Loki could not. He would not be satisfied with less than a full acknowledgement from Thor.

Thor visibly swallowed, and in the next exhale he admitted, defeated, “I told you that at least being a soldier was meaningful and that just because this station was founded by scientists didn’t make you significant.”

“Yeah. You did.” Loki nodded, clenched his jaw, and bit back some tears because this was not the moment to show his soft underbelly. “Yeah, you did say that.” He had been in a bitchy mood and convinced he was being harassed by the government. He had complained and been terrible to Thor. He had been down.

And then that big blonde eager doggo had bitten him.

Thor hunched over and stopped looking him in the eyes, the coward. He scuffed his foot across the linoleum floor, ashamed. “When you called me,” — Loki hissed, not really ready to rehash the last moment they had met, but he had asked for it, right? — “you called me and I came instantly. Loki. I thought I had lost you; I didn’t know if you were even alive.” Thor paused. “But… then I didn’t even get to say a word and you piled all the blame on me, for Martina, for the lab, for your work, for… and I had no idea how to… process it.”

Loki turned around to face the kitchen cabinets because he couldn’t hear this anguish, and he couldn’t see that perfect man with the golden glow, either, he just couldn’t.

“I came, and you were there, and you hated me, and I couldn’t do anything because… because SAF and murder? I didn’t want to believe that.” He paused again, and then spoke lower, nearly a murmur “I didn’t want to believe you.”

Loki tried to sniffle covertly, to hide the fact that his nose was getting runny. He rasped out, “You should always believe me, first. Me. First.”

“You said that I just had it easy, I was just a brainless robot executing orders. You told me I was—”

“An idiot.”

“A cretin,” Thor added. “It hurt. It always hurts, you know.”

Loki gulped back tears, because where did you go from there? He should say something, but they had agreed maybe three breakups ago that words meant literally nothing, because their tempers were so volatile that only actions could really measure up to the hurt they bestowed upon each other.

What could they even do to overcome this?

Fuck, he was not crying, he was _not_.

How could he even show that he respected Thor’s mind? What could Thor even do to prove he respected Loki’s words? And why would he even try to get back into that stupid relationship? Why? What was even the point?

He heard Thor walk up behind him. And what sounded like Steve and Bucky dashing for the exit — most likely to go see Shuri, good for them. Loki had already stalled them enough just for the personal satisfaction of having Thor squirm. He hoped the best for them or whatever.

Loki sniffed as discreetly as he could. He couldn’t break. “Thor, I can’t do this again.”

Thor embraced him slowly with his big beefy arms, and hell, Loki had missed that so much. “What can’t you do?” He’d missed those hugs like missing a limb, like missing sunshine, like missing rain and warmth and comfort in the cold dead heart of this space station.

Loki shook his head in an attempt at shaking Thor off, but he felt Thor’s blunt fingers sweetly brush a strand of hair behind his ear. “I can’t let you come back. I’ll get bitter again about something else, and you’ll get angry. I’ll smash plates, you will insult me. I leave you, you leave me. I’m miserable, you are too. You come back grovelling because I don’t. Rinse, repeat.” Loki closed his eyes in an attempt at staving off his tears, which was such a pointless endeavour as he stood trembling slightly in Thor’s arms. “I hate you, please, stop. I hate you, so let’s just stop.”

“Shhh, it’s okay. I don’t.” Loki shrugged, so Thor repeated fiercely, “I don’t.” Thor released him, only to turn Loki around to face him, bittersweet, golden and hunched over to take his face in both of his huge hands, with his eyes looking at Loki sweetly and his stupid blonde hair cropped short.

“You always forget all the parts where we’re good together. Loki, you always forget. The nights together. The quiet. The smiles. The trips to Earth. You forget our first kiss in freefall and you forget bringing me flowers, you forget me giving you some back. Those moments, to me, they make everything worth it.”

And wasn’t this the crux of the problem? Loki guessed that some people would be appalled. Thor wasn’t worth the pain he caused Loki. And maybe Loki wasn’t worth the pain he inflicted on Thor. But Thor really was worth the comfort he gave. He was an oaf. A stupid douche. He was insensitive, terrible, made the worst of puns.

Loki hated him so much.

Loki loved him much too much.

“I don’t know what to do, Thor.”

The big oaf gave him a sheepish half-smile. “What I said was terrible, but the worst thing was that I didn’t believe you. Let me show you that I can listen.”

Loki’s eyes searched Thor’s face, not sure what he was talking about, or what he was getting at.

“I’ve seen what the military has done. My mistake, for having needed proof when I should have trusted you.” His thumbs stroked Loki’s cheekbones. “I quit. They asked me to go capture Rogers, bring him back. I took the opportunity, I deserted. I’ll follow you wherever you want. Being SAF was supposed to bring out the best of me, and it has made me the worst version of myself.”

Loki blinked a few times, and the emotional whiplash after such a draining conversation wasn’t helping him to deal with that… tidbit of…

He thought of those two desperate dumbasses en route to Shuri’s and their stupid star-crossed-lovers journey. He thought about Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers, making plans, sending clues and information to this Phillips person. He thought about fucking up the system.

“Would you like to bring them down? With me?”

Thor’s eyebrows rose, and then he embraced Loki’s waist in those big arms of his. “Aren’t I too dumb for that?”

Loki clung to his neck. “Ah. Well. Maybe if you don’t have the brains, I’ll have use for your brawn, then.”

And when Thor finally kissed him, Loki thought that yes. Maybe.

Maybe the good times were worth every single bad one.

Healthy relationships were overrated, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:
> 
>   * Cукаблядь: [sukablyad'] son of a bitch, litt. Bitch-slut
>   * Отвечай, сука?!: [Otvechai, suka!] Who the fuck are you?!
>   * что за мысли такие?: [chto za mysli takie?], I’m confused, lit. what kind of thoughts are these?
> 



	10. Lagrangian Points

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Bucky is going to be alright, safe, although not completely sound, and Chester Phillips is not amused.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for graphic description of a sci-fi medical procedure: it's a bit gorish.
> 
> There will be a link at the beginning of the medical procedure (it's hard to miss, it begins with "the operation"): click it and you'll jump right after.
> 
> I hope you'll enjoy my Sergei. There is some more Thorki, because I wuv those snarky dumbasses.

### Part III, Chapter 10: Lagrangian Points

In celestial mechanics, the Lagrange points (/ləˈɡrɑːndʒ/ also Lagrangian points, L-points, or libration points) are orbital points near two large co-orbiting bodies. At the Lagrange points the gravitational forces of the two large bodies cancel out in such a way that a small object placed in orbit there is in equilibrium relative to the center of mass of the large bodies.

There are five such points, labeled L1 to L5, all in the orbital plane of the two large bodies. L1, L2, and L3 are on the line through the centers of the two large bodies, while L4 and L5 each act as the third vertex of an equilateral triangle formed with the centers of the two large bodies. L1, L2, L3 are unstable equilibria, whereas L4 and L5 are stable, which implies that objects can orbit around them in a rotating coordinate system tied to the two large bodies.

For each given combination of co-orbiting planetary bodies there are five Lagrange points L1 to L5 for the Sun—Earth system, and in a similar way there are five different Lagrange points for the Earth—Moon system. Several planets have trojan satellites near their L4 and L5 points with respect to the Sun. Jupiter has more than a million of these trojans. Artificial satellites have been placed in orbits near to L1 and L2 with respect to the Sun and Earth, and with respect to the Earth and the Moon. The Lagrange points have been proposed for uses in space exploration.

`— Wikipedia, “Lagrange point”`

Dear Charlotte,

They tell me letters take a month to get delivered to the Moon; postal ships have to make the rounds of all the space stations and scientific bases out there, it takes time. I knew I wouldn’t be able to call. The orbit of 2 Pallas is so eccentric, the communication window is reduced to only two hours each orbit. Calls are reserved for emergencies, mining orders, organisation; in short, it’s only the foreman and both union boards who can place a call.

I love you. I’m sorry.

I’m sorry I messed up, I’m sorry I did what I did. We could have had it all, a family, a dog, a whole quarter to ourselves on Explorer 9 with a view of Venus. I’m sorry I put the cart before the horse. I vied for a place I should have waited for, I thought I was clever.

They made me meet the woman whose promotion I messed up by falsifying the forms. It was hard. But not harder than being far from you, half a solar system away.

Pallas is… harsh. Gravity is near inexistent. As soon as I set foot on the mining base, I was immediately fitted with an exoskeleton, which hasn’t left my body since, except for sleeping and sonic showers. Water is so scarce we have to have it imported. The asteroid rotates pretty quickly around itself, so the base has orientable mirrors and fake daylight and nighttime periods so that we don’t get too disoriented.

Since I’m a newbie and I’m here to be reformed, they sent me out with an experienced team and we are mining salt. They suspect there are rare Earth metals under the salt domes.

I’m going to do my time, I love you. I’m sorry. Wait for me.

`—Collective, “Letters From the Deep: Reform and Redemption in Space”`

Steve and Bucky — Steve checked, and he hoped that this was Bucky, or at the very least a highly shocky version of him — quickly found the shop where Shuri was supposed to be. Steve had taken care to check for anybody trying to follow them, which really wasn’t part of his regular skillset. At least Bucky, or Sergei, or whoever was in there under all the agony and buzzing, screaming implant noises, was partly conscious, and Steve didn’t have to carry him. He still staggered, held up by Steve’s arm around his waist and blinking owlishly at Steve and the streets and the signs when he wasn’t clenching his eyes shut and crying in pain.

Fuck, Steve was in over his head.

He was overwhelmed with noise; everybody around these parts had at least some sort of implant, and his brain was awash with sounds of all kinds. He tried to focus on the very distinct static that the cameras emitted, and each and every time, he scrambled the signal.

And now, here they were, in front of tunnel sixteen’s entrance, which looked like the gaping mouth of a gigantic eel, opening onto a barely-lit street reminiscent of a covered marketplace. It sounded to Steve like the electricity had shorted out in several places, because he couldn’t hear the low chirping of power lines. Back-up generators cobbled together from old spaceship parts lined the building walls.

“Steve,” Bucky panted, “Steve, I don’t feel so good.” This was Bucky, he sounded like Bucky, he had no accent, oh Bucky.

“It’s okay Buck, I’m gonna get you some help, I swear.” Steve gripped Bucky’s bomber jacket and hoisted Bucky’s arm more securely around his shoulders. “Come on, baby, we’re nearly there.” Shit, that had escaped of its own volition.

Loki had been right, the shop was unmistakable. Its front was lit up in a pattern mimicking circuit boards. No shop sign, no name, only elegant circuitry done in optical fibers so fine that Steve thought at first it was a real printed circuit board with some phosphor added to the vias and conductive tracks.

As Steve was examining the front of the shop, Bucky said in a broken, desolate voice, “Steve, I don’t want you to go.”

Steve’s throat closed, flashing back to the moment he’d been in the hatch, both of them convinced that he was going to die. Oh mama, was Bucky hallucinating? Having flashbacks? “I’m not leaving you.”

Bucky shook his head, his big body now nearly limp, and Steve the only thing holding him up. He mumbled, “But you are.” Steve hoisted him again and walked up to the shop. Bucky’s head lolled and he murmured, “I love you.”

Fuck. Steve reached the door and opened it without ceremony. He murmured a quick, “I love you too, Bucky, please stay awake, baby,” and marched them both over to the counter where a nondescript white man was standing. The man quickly lost his smile at the same rate that Steve approached.

“Hello… uhhh…” the man said, but Steve was having none of that hesitation and politeness bullshit.

He slammed his hand down on the metal counter, which let out an ominous clank and groan. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, I have a toaster to repair.” The man blinked owlishly. “Now!”

A speaker whined and a voice spoke: “Bring him down.”

Steve looked at the microphone and then looked pointedly at the camera in the corner and nodded while Random McWhiteGuy waved them deeper into the shop, looking a bit unsure, but not questioning the orders. He pushed aside a potted plant illuminated with ultraviolet light to reveal a trapdoor. He tapped his foot twice on the trapdoor, which then opened from the inside.

“Heya, dudes,” came the chirping voice of a young black woman, her face marked with a pattern of metal chips, surely sensors of some kind. Her wide smile dimmed quickly when she caught sight of Bucky. “Oh, wow, that’s a big one. Bring him down!” Her smile widened once more, and she disappeared down into the bowels of the shop.

Steve looked at Bucky, his pallor, the sweat on his brow, and the way he was clinging to Steve’s cotton shirt like a lifebelt. “Hey, Buck?”

Bucky blinked sluggishly. “Steve? You’re alive?” He blinked again. “Who are you?”

Steve swallowed with difficulty and bit his lip. “Okay, let’s get you down, big guy.”

Bucky shook his head, but ultimately, as Steve was able to mostly carry him down the stairs thanks to his enhanced strength, the process ended up being easier than he’d thought.

“Come!” the woman said. She seemed really young, but maybe those face implants kept her apparent age younger than she actually was? She pointed to an examination table while she prepared an assortment of tools.

Steve looked at Bucky, or Sergei, again — or the blank-faced guy, who knew at this point? — and sighed, resolute, before gripping Bucky around the shoulders, stooping a bit, bracing his other arm behind Bucky’s knees and just bridal-carrying him over to the table.

Thank fuck for that stupid nanomaterial.

He laid Bucky on the gurney and then grabbed his right hand, lacing their fingers together. He felt Bucky’s fingers close feebly around his. Steve looked back up to check what the woman — Shuri, most likely — was doing, and to tell her more about the situation, because surely she would need some history to work with?

“He’s. Uh. I… I found-.” Steve stopped floundering, heaved a breath to calm down, and started over. “He’s never had any implants, then I had to leave, and I came back, and he had all of these, and when I saw him, a guy… Loki Laufeyson?” Shuri rolled a small table up to the gurney and hummed when he said the name… which… could mean anything really. “Loki was connected to his blackbox, I think he flashed it, and—”

“Hoo boy, really?” She raised an eyebrow, looking straight at Steve while her hands were aligning tools that looked… decidedly pointy. A handheld multimeter. A set of lasers. A roll of isolation tape. A square case with “ **WARNING: MAGNETS** ” written in bold capitals.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Was he using his optical fibre jack to use the soliton generator or was he just doing the basic firewire link but with his own BB connection?”

Steve had a momentary brain fart because he had no spacely idea what the fuck Shuri was talking about. But. Optical fibre. Yes, that.

“The optical fibres. He had all those neon hairs jammed into the…” Steve made a circular motion with his finger. “The port or something.”

Shuri snorted, then rearranged the tools and picked up a laser. “The port or something.” She grinned at Steve. “Okay, baby cyborg, turn your friend on his belly, I’m gonna access his ‘port or something.’”

It was a testament to how overwhelmed and panicked Steve was that he didn’t even care about the obvious sarcasm being thrown at him.

He disentangled his left hand from Bucky’s and, trying not to reflect too much on how Bucky’s body was now limp and unresponsive, turned him over onto his front.

Shuri slid a clear glass mask over her face, turned it on, and immediately went to work, her view augmented with a huge quantity of information and diagrams.

The blackbox implant site looked raw and inflamed, with some blood clots clinging to Bucky’s skin. The blackbox itself looked like a square of raised skin, but it had a very artificial sheen to it because the semi-transparent silicone let through some of the blue-grey metallic lustre of the silicon circuitry beneath it.

Shuri prodded the site with tweezers isolated with orange kapton tape. “That looks nasty. Not your usual blackbox design.” She poked at the three different ports, each one an orifice in the silicone with jagged edges. “You say Loki was connected, anybody else?”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t know, Bucky thought he was someone else when I found him with Loki, and he fled, I only found him again like two hours ago. He could have been anywhere…”

Shuri clucked her tongue and jammed a needle-like probe into each of the ports and dialled her multimeter — although hers looked way more complicated than the ones Steve used to have back in high school electronics.

The device beeped, beeped again, then beeped much louder. Shuri muttered, “Dude,” turned a small dial, and the same three-tone beep happened again. She looked at Steve. “Where did he get that implant?”

Steve frowned and looked around at the messy, cluttered basement, machines stashed in dark recesses, the gurney the only place really illuminated by five rows of LED lamps. “I don’t know. My best guess would be his new commissioner at—”

“Wait, wait, wait.” She held up her hands to stop him. “You are police?” She pointed at Bucky. “Is _he_ a cop?”

Steve licked his lips. Fuck Earth cops and their failures. Fuck this case, and fuck detectives. Fuck everything. “I have reason to believe a whole unit of Detective HQ has been misleading cases, smuggling contraband and skewing facts. Bucky is one of their latest victims.” There.

“Pshhhh.” She waved him off. “That’s not what I meant, cyboy. I mean, your friend here? If he’s a cop, that thing he’s wearing right there? It’s illegal as fuuuuuuuck… Which is kind of, you know,” — she made some sort of balancing gestures with her two hands, needle probes waving about — “contradictory?”

Steve licked his lips, looked around again at the mess, and glanced back at Shuri. “How illegal is ‘illegal as fuuuuuuuck?’”

Shuri snorted. “Well, my man, my dude, you know that all implants linked directly to the amygdala were yeeted right out by the government like… fifty years ago? You know the law, no messing with the amygdala, no messing with the hippocampus, right?” Steve nodded. “Okay, well, this one does both. It’s a darkbox. An old one, at that. Early models, real nasty shit, that’s the stuff that gave birth to that whole spookybox urban legend. So, you know, I’d really like to meet the weirdo villain who thought of inventing that thing and hooking it up to humans so I can slap him around with a large trout.”

Steve really didn’t know how much more bad news he could take. He really didn’t, and he really didn’t want to find out. Part of him was screaming, a long wail that was overtaking his entire brain, drowning out even the electronic sounds that the wipeout picked up. Another, detached part of him spoke in his stead, deadly calm and steady, like a puppet façade, a default setting taking over for him.

“Can you do anything?”

Shuri shrugged. “Well I can do lots of things, question is, what are you expecting from this operation?”

“He sometimes behaves like someone else, a guy named Sergei. Sometimes he goes absolutely blank and only responds to direct orders.”

“Yee-ah, that would be implanted memories battling it out with your friend’s memories, too much data, too little space on the flash drive. Spookybox legend material. The other thing, the blank slate thing, would be the amygdala overpass: he can’t recognise emotional input, can’t relate, stimuli aren’t associated with emotions, you know the drill.”

He didn’t, in fact, know any drills, but he absolutely understood how fucked up that implant was.

Shuri bent back over Bucky’s neck, and this time tested the ports with some sort of tablet-sized sensor she pressed against the skin and implant. She continued rambling. “I’m guessing that’s why he got this, because it makes him receptive to orders and shit. The Sergei thing, that must be a side effect, collateral damage. Leftover stuff that stayed once the implant started going unstable. Darkboxes aren’t really reliable.”

“Did Loki create the instability?”

“When he flashed the chip? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t have a lot to go on from your info.”

Steve wiped his mouth with his hand nervously. “If you extract the implant, what are the consequences?”

“Your guy should have no more problems with blanking. However, there’s a big chance that the fake memories will stay there.”

Steve’s hand reached out to Bucky’s back and laid there of its own volition. “What if we keep it in? Can you alleviate the pain?”

Shuri frowned at him severely, telegraphing her exact thoughts on that option. “Sure, I can alleviate the pain so that he can slide into a vegetative state in peace.” Her tone was scathing. “I have some chips I can inject around the implant site that will prevent rejection, especially since that little torture device isn’t coated in titanium. Leaving that thing on, though, it’s both illegal and it’ll make sure your friend’s memories are erased for sure. I can reflash the implant, get out the tripwire making him go blank. But then I guess you know the consequences of leaving a darkbox in, right?”

Steve had already known there was really no choice. Not since Loki had insinuated that this implant was much more than the simple recording device some people liked to get implanted with. “Okay.” He pinched the bridge of his nose; he needed proof that Bucky was a victim of whatever was happening right now. He needed definite proof because, as it was, Bucky could be shown to have enrolled voluntarily in a scheme to falsify cases and evidence. “Can you get the implant out and keep it sufficiently readable that we could use it in a case against the fuckers who did this to him?”

Shuri beamed wide and winked at him. “I can do you one better, I can get it out intact, freeze the software, trace back whatever Loki tampered with, and give a full history on chip and software sourcing.”

Steve gawked for a second, gobsmacked, because, this, _this_ was maybe one of the best leads he had against Lukin, how he had used Bucky, and what smuggling operations he had been involved in.

Fuck, was this good news?

“I have no money right now. No identity, I was declared dead three months ago,” he hedged.

“Well, you sure don’t have present money, but I’m sure you will have future money, eh?” Still smiling, she went to retrieve a pair of nitrile gloves and put them on with a sharp snap. “I’m not Sister Pro Bono, but you told me you were going against those dicks who are targeting our people. Ever heard of Jessica Jones? You get one of ours and the transhumans will have your back. You succeed, cyborg boy, and that might be payment enough already, heh.”

Steve choked out a strangled, “Thank you,” and leant down to put his face right next to Bucky’s. He looked asleep, pained, strained. Steve wiped away some moisture that had gathered on his brow and under his eye. Then he closed his own eyes, and for one single moment where he breathed the same air, he thought that maybe everything would end up okay, somehow.

“We’re gonna get them, Bucky, we’re going gonna get them and fuck them up.”

Then he straightened back up and nodded at Shuri. She gazed at him with the same good humour she’d had from the start. “We good?”

He nodded. “We’re good.”

He went to sit in a corner of the room next to a teetering tower of old distribution boards, waiting for Shuri to begin.

“It’s gonna be a while,” she warned him, starting to pick off the silicone skin.

He’d been awake for too long but, “No power in the universe could make me leave,” he said. Neither sleep nor gravity could take him away.

Shuri snorted. “Then fasten your seatbelt, cyboy, and get ready to help out.”

* * *

The operation had been gruelling, firstly because Steve was on the brink of sleep deprivation, and secondly because he had had to help Shuri several times either by holding up tools and lighting or holding Bucky down when his nervous reflexes kicked in. The whole operation had been excruciating in a vast number of ways. There had been blood and lymph, but the most disgusting moment might have been when Shuri had finally been able to short-circuit the whole implant and was ready to get it out.

She had made an incision next to the implant and in three spots on Bucky’s neck and skull, had asked Steve to please hold the light right above so she had a clear view, and then she had _pulled_.

He’d never be able to shake off that image. The wires, thin as hairs, shiny with blood, slowly being extracted, millimetre by torturous millimetre. Bucky had had those things stuffed under his skin for days, weeks, maybe.

Steve’s horror-addled brain dimly registered that in no way would Bucky have consented to this. He had always loathed the idea of being implanted.

There had been more operating, more holding Bucky down, mending the implant site, injections, holding the light, lowering the light. And as soon as Shuri had wiped the sweat from her brow and taken her nitrile gloves off, Steve had crashed.

Hard.

He had sat there right beside Bucky’s gurney, paper cover just changed, and Bucky’s breathing slow and steady as he laid on his back, clean, or at least clean enough — Steve wasn’t his ma, bless her soul.

He had gotten one good look at Bucky, sighed, and next thing he knew, he snorted himself awake, bleary-eyed, crusty and so tired that it felt like a hangover, his internal clock telling him that six hours had passed and it was now five forty-seven p.m. He sat up, and a piece of paper fell on the floor. When he picked it up, he saw handwriting he didn’t recognize.

_Shop’s closed during the day. Will open back up at 7p.m._

_Left you cause I don’t need to witness teary gay cyboy reunions._ There was a doodle of a face bearing the same marks as Shuri laughing to tears.

_Close the door behind you “Detective Officer Steven Grant Rogers.”_

Steve looked around and saw a computer screen, turned towards him, with his detective file pulled up and a sticky note saying “nice mugshot! =D” beside his picture. Well he sure looked somber on it...

A groan coming from his left made him jump in surprise, and he turned to Bucky. First, he wanted to hold his hand, then thought better of it, maybe lightly touch his shoulder? But he didn’t want to startle him. Steve hovered awkwardly, as Bucky frowned, groaned again, and turned his face away from the overhead light.

Steve tucked his own hands into the long sleeves of his light jacket, unsure.

Then Bucky’s head lolled back in his direction, still bearing the marks of all the smaller mods that had been removed, and his eyes fluttered open, then closed, visibly dry and painful.

“Bucky?”

Bucky screwed his eyes shut, looking pained. “No…”

Steve winced and made an effort to hide his devastation. Bucky wouldn’t have survived with the implant still in there; he couldn’t regret his decision. But it still… hurt. And it would hurt a lot more if those strange implanted memories of that Sergei persona had overwritten Bucky entirely.

Steve saw how thickly Bucky was swallowing, eyes still scrunched up as if he didn’t want to see anything. Steve hurried over to a small shelf with cereal bars and chocolate and glasses on it, then filled a glass with water and sat closer to Bucky.

“Hey. Hey, let’s have a drink before anything, okay? I need you to raise your head a little.”

Bucky tried to sit up on the bed, but it became quickly obvious that everything was a struggle. Steve used his free arm to help Bucky rise, as if he weighed nothing. He put the glass to Bucky’s lips and watched raptly as he drank with difficulty.

He was there, finally.

Alive.

Warm.

In his arms.

It was Steve’s turn to shut his eyes, lest he show how overwhelmed by relief he was. He could hold it in, now, he could. Because Bucky — in whatever shape or form he now was — Bucky was here.

Bucky stopped sipping at some point, and Steve put the glass away on another trolley filled with tools, but couldn’t find it in him to release Bucky.

“Can I still hold you?” he asked quietly.

Silence stretched on for several seconds before Bucky answered, “Yes,” in a low, raspy voice.

Steve immediately buried his nose in the soft cotton of Bucky’s t-shirt, embracing him with all the strength he dared to use, careful not to crush, desperate to keep close. “I thought I was going to lose you. I was afraid you’d die here,” Steve sobbed out, muffled in Bucky’s shoulder.

He felt a hand, trembling and unsure, touch the back of his head, stroking his hair delicately. “Come on, Stevie, shouldn’t you be happier I finally joined you?”

Steve sniffed and frowned, his mind still abuzz with the relief of having his arms full, but— “Joined me?” He sat back to get a good look at Bucky’s face, his slight five o’clock shadow, the gel plasters on all the implant sites where Shuri had taken all the chips out, small strips of blueish glue on his brow and on both of his cheeks. He looked at Bucky’s eyes and noticed how they were still so grey, but also how his irises had a distinctly different-coloured outer ring.

Steve looked and filed away all the ways that this Bucky was the same, all the ways that this Bucky was different. The way he looked quizzically at Steve. The way he smiled shyly. The way he said hesitantly, “Well, we’re both dead now, right?”

Steve shook his head, half a smile stretching his chapped lips. “Nah, Buck, we’re both alive. Made it to the other side.”

He felt Bucky’s whole frame freeze and tense in his arms while his gaze skittered to the left, deliberately avoiding Steve. “No. I. You’re not real.”

“But I am.” Steve smiled gently, and tried to catch his gaze, to no avail, because Bucky’s eyes scrunched shut again and he winced, tense, as if bracing for a blow. “No,” he said, his voice tiny and scared, “no, I don’t know you, I don’t remember you, you’re not real.”

“Bucky.”

“I’m not Bucky!” he yelled, throwing off Steve’s embrace. Bucky rose from the gurney and jumped to his feet, swaying slightly but still trying to put some space between them. His eyes were looking everywhere but at Steve, and he looked… panicked and angry. Cornered. “Who the fuck are you!?” He sounded different, voice harsher, deeper.

“I’m Steve!” Steve rose to his feet, too, gesturing wildly, unable to contain himself. “You know me! We’ve known each other our whole lives!” He felt just as panicked as Bucky looked, because perhaps, perhaps this was it. Perhaps he _had_ lost him, and his friend wasn’t coming back. And, then, maybe staying alive hadn’t been worth it. “I knew you when you were six! You were—”

“I lived in Saint Petersburg,” Sergei cut Steve off. “I lived in Saint Petersburg, with my mother, my sister. Yelena…” He looked puzzled, but mostly shaken, his eyes staring off to the side, searching his memories.

“You were born in space, Buck, we’ve never been to Earth.” Steve tried to break the news gently.

Sergei gritted his teeth. “So you’re telling me my family’s not real? That my sister doesn’t fucking exist? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

 _Oh dear, oh Ma, please come help me, I’m losing it._ “Buck. No. Sergei. Listen.” Steve tried to placate Sergei, or at least get some kind of control over the conversation. “Listen, my best friend’s name is James Bar—” Sergei growled menacingly, “—nes, he’s a detective for the Island one space station force.” Sergei opened his mouth, looking ready to protest vehemently. “He bit off a lot more than he could chew and a fucking asshole put an implant in his head with memories that didn’t belong to him. The implant got hacked, it scrambled everything, and now here you are, inside his body, I guess.”

Silence welcomed Steve’s words as Sergei’s jaw worked furiously. He looked lost, but mostly angry. He must have defaulted back to that emotion because it was always easier to work with anger than confusion.

“So you’re telling me I’m just a figment of someone’s imagination? Of my own imagination? I’m not real, is that it?”

“Sergei…”

“You have some _fucking_ nerve.”

Steve opened his arms wide. “You’re real! Okay, you are!” he exclaimed, desperate. “Whatever you are, or the way you were… inoculated, you’re still inside Bucky, you’re still here, so… you’re real, okay? You exist. I’m talking to you, that’s proof enough that you are. We just have to deal with this.”

Sergei shook his head.

“You’re real, okay, I admit, you’re real, I… Okay, so you have a mother in Russia, on Earth. A sister. Okay. But please.” He took a step closer, as Sergei was raising his gaze slowly from where it had been fixed furiously on the ground. “Please. Meet me halfway. Whatever, whoever you are, you’re… you have my best friend’s face. I can’t—”

Steve stopped, because that was as far as he could go. Silence fell again, only troubled by a rhythmic beeping coming from upstairs and the soft electrical noises that only Steve could hear. Bucky’s implantless body was now blessedly silent, and that was maybe the only relief he could feel in the moment.

“What’s—” Sergei stopped and then started again. “What’s your name, again?”

Steve looked up guardedly. “Steve Rogers.”

Sergei clenched his jaw and turned away; he was breathing deeply. He turned back to Steve. “What’s my name?”

Steve gnawed on his lip. “Sergei?”

“Sergei Andreyevich Smerdyakov.” Sergei breathed out very slowly. Breathed in and out. The line of his shoulders still looked tense, his jaw working in a way that Bucky’s never did. His nostrils flared, and eyes still closed, he very quietly asked, “And what’s his?”

Steve couldn’t speak for several seconds, throat closing on a tangled ball of emotions. “James Buchanan Barnes.” Sergei flinched. “Bucky. He’s Bucky.” Sergei flinched again but nodded jerkily and seemed to brace himself for some sort of impact.

Steve let him be, strung like a live wire, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It seemed like the inner battle warring inside Bucky’s body lasted for ages. Then Sergei opened his eyes and went around the gurney, came to Steve and — to Steve’s surprise — engulfed him in his arms.

For a second, Steve couldn’t react.

“He’s in here, Steve,” Bucky whispered in his ear, his breath damp. “I feel him inside. We’re both in here.”

Steve clutched Bucky tightly back. Bucky. Finally. Bucky, his voice, his body, his everything in Steve’s arms, whole and safe and as sane as possible. “I’ve got you then. I’ve got you both.” He buried his nose into Bucky’s neck, grateful that the gelled incisions were on the other side.

“Steve.”

“I’m not leaving.”

Bucky clung to Steve, nosing at the short hair behind his ear. “I feel like. I feel like if I let go, you won’t be here anymore,” he murmured fearfully.

Steve tried to push back, maybe to look Bucky in the face, see him in order to reassure him, but Bucky clenched his arms even tighter, so Steve just returned his embrace.

“If I disappear, I’ll come back, Buck.” Steve carded his left hand through Bucky’s soft, wavy hair. “I’ll always come back to you.”

It was a long time before they left the basement, Steve’s shirt damp with tears.

* * *

The trip back to Loki’s flat was below zero on the fun scale. Bucky had visibly transitioned back to himself, at least, but wouldn’t meet Steve’s eyes, for reasons beyond Steve’s comprehension. After the hug, Bucky turned subdued, mutely nodding as Steve recounted the last days and how he had chased after him… until Steve stopped speaking altogether. They walked silently through the throng of people, looking frazzled and exhausted. Bucky still bore the marks of his recent surgery, which made him slightly conspicuous in those parts, and neither of them had a facemask. They weren’t alone in being maskless, however, so at least they weren’t standing out like sore thumbs. Steve tried to focus on the camera tones so he would be less overwhelmed by the ruckus around him, both from the human crowd and from the electronics.

They finally staggered back into Loki’s flat, just to end up face-to-face with Loki striking a pose dressed in what looked like a huge shirt and not much else, mid-rant, while Thor was walking around in just a towel, smiling softly, one hand holding up the dangerously slipping scrap of textile protecting his modesty and the other holding a recording device.

“I insist that setting fire to the whole thing would be much more satisfying, darling.”

Thor guffawed; his towel slipped further, which revealed even more of his treasure trail and a part of his body that was so dangerously far down that Steve wasn’t sure he could say it was still his iliac furrow without lying.

“Oh. You’re here,” Loki said dismissively and then smirked, taking a cup of tea that had been sitting on the counter. “And I see our local Harvey Dent has come back, too, and I can now look at you without my eyes hurting me, brilliant.” He sipped his tea.

“Doe, be nice.” Thor said offhandedly, fiddling with the device.

Steve placed himself between Loki and Bucky. Loki rolled his eyes and accompanied the movement by twisting his body around and turning to Thor again. “Oh please, Detective Steve, I have my own, thank you very much,” he said, and went to kiss, or maybe half-climb Thor like a tree, it was hard to tell, surely to prove his point.

Behind Steve, Bucky leaned down and whispered in his ear, “Is _that_ Laufeyson?” At Steve’s curt nod he continued. “Like, the same guy we scoured the colony over just to find his ass, the guy I chased on a rooftop and shit?”

“Pray tell, detectives,” Loki asked, now draped over Thor’s lap like a very dramatic ragdoll, and oh boy, did neither of them care a lot about propriety, “my lovely sunboy here thought that the best way to tear SAF to the ground would be to ‘record’ his ‘life experiences’ there. Please tell him how inefficient that is. Surely there’s a protocol for nuking the Moon Base from orbit, no?”

Steve sighed internally because recording witness statements was actually what they should be doing, and there was nothing better in life than contradicting Loki, but at the same time, he already felt drained by the energy he would have to expend in justifying it to him.

“You want to do what now?” Bucky asked from behind Steve’s shoulder.

Steve got ready to give Bucky the cliffnotes on what they were gearing up to do, but Loki beat him to the punch, sitting straight up in Thor’s lap. “SAF transferred all the findings of my lab to their facilities instead of destroying them as per the law, then proceeded to imprison Detective Cutie Pie and also tried to cover up the accidental death of an ex-colleague of mine.”

Bucky gaped a bit, and Thor clicked the device off and kissed Loki’s temple. “Perfect introduction, Doe, thank you.”

“You’re welcome!” Loki chirped, inordinately happy with himself.

“Are they talking about Martina’s murder?”

Steve sighed. “Yeah. I think so.”

Bucky kept talking in his ear, which made Steve shiver slightly. “And the transfer, that’s…”

“Yeah, that’s part of what we disturbed that… that night in Liminal Space.”

“Oh.”

As they were talking, Loki and Thor were still canoodling like teenagers on the sofa, and Steve felt that they were maybe seconds away from throwing off the last few items of clothing they had on and getting down to business. “Okay, Bucky, we should maybe take their depositions, ‘cause…”

Bucky winced. “Yeah. Okay, I can take Lo—”

“I’ll take Loki!” Steve said over Bucky hastily. Bucky tilted his head, looking at him askance. “I mean…”

Silence fell for one second while Bucky’s eyebrows did a complicated dance and Loki giggled blithely. Then Bucky’s expression seemed to go stony, but he shook his head vehemently — shaking off Sergei? Did Sergei come back when Bucky tried to dive into the memories of his moments as Sergei? Bucky’s expression settled for contrite, and he glanced at Loki, then back at Steve. “Something happened? While I was…”

Steve sighed, again, “Yeah, while you… yeah. We’ll. Just. Okay.” Steve brushed his hand through his hair, which was spiked up in all directions at this stage of the… day. Week. At this stage of his _life_. “Listen, we’ll talk about it later, okay?”

Bucky nodded rapidly, looking hesitant.

“You don’t remember anything from when you are Sergei, right?”

He shook his head mutely. Steve repressed his sigh this time.

“All right!” Steve clapped his hands, startling Loki and Thor. “Thor, Bucky is going to take your statement. Loki, you’re with me, statement.”

“Oh, is that so?” Loki stood up instantly. “Where do you want me, Detective?”

 _On Mars without an air tank_. “Let’s go to the bedroom.”

Loki sauntered over to the bedroom door, then turned coyly towards Steve. “Should I put some trousers on?”

_Oh Mama, lend me your strength._

* * *

Interrogating Thor was an easy enough affair. The man, who had finally found some boxer shorts and his black-and-blue fatigue pants to jump into, was relatively direct, friendly, and overall happy, for all that one could be happy to testify against a whole branch of the government.

“So, you had prior knowledge of the government order to shut down all research into wipeout?”

“Yes, General Ross circulated a memo with an attached copy of the order, something like a week prior to the shut down.” So that would explain some of the paperwork they had been wading through, reporting that SAF had overseen the destruction of part of the experiments being led in lab Alpha. Back then, it hadn’t made much sense…

“And was Laufeyson made aware of that fact around the same time?”

Thor looked sheepish and grimaced. “Uhhh, not really?”

Ouch. Bucky gave him a lopsided smile. “Hmmm, by not really…”

“Yeah, no, I didn’t tell him.”

A vague recollection of an argument between Thor and Loki sprang to Bucky’s mind, but the memory was muddled and warped. He recalled some words, a vague feeling of betrayal, and knew that Steve had also been there but… Yeah, must have been right before Steve brought him to have his implants extracted judging by Steve’s own cliff notes of what had happened in the last forty-eight hours.

Bucky fiddled with the old-as-balls recorder Thor had given him, then proceeded with the interrogation. This felt good. This felt normal. Asking questions, listening to the witness, sussing out details, investigating.

Knowing St—

Knowing. Knowing he — he, his partner, he had a partner? Rogers, Rumlow — was in the other room. Ignoring it. His thoughts muddled for a second, and he heard the yell of Sergei’s voice at the back of his mind, screaming to be let out.

Thor was in the middle of explaining how SAF had sent two rookies (Private Gold and Private Jenkins) to meet Martina Ahmed, but the whole operation had been conducted on a need-to-know basis, so they hadn’t expected to find a ruthless negotiator or an irate Loki facing them. Thor had gotten wind that it had ended so badly, the two had been reassigned to an observation ship cruising around Venus. It was only way later that he’d heard Ahmed had died. Bucky shivered, and had to focus back on the conversation at hand.

He knew there was still something wrong with him. This fucking implant had scrambled his thoughts thoroughly for weeks, and every time he had thought about his… life as Bucky Barnes, the pain had been so all-encompassing that, even now, he couldn’t _not_ shy away from those same thoughts. All those times they had made him switch to that blank state, too, he’d felt himself recede slowly from himself, being taken over by this Sergei thing. Persona.

Focusing was a struggle. He was asking questions, he knew, but he felt himself recede.

Recede.

“Okay, so.” Bucky cleared his throat. He felt parched. “Now, you participated in the imprisonment of—”

Of.

“Barnes?”

Sergei had a moment of befuddlement as he wondered what the fuck he was supposed to ask. He looked at Thor and his huge arms crossed over his chest, lying back on the sofa. Sergei was sitting on the coffee table. He frowned, looked at the… oh, a recorder, looked like a model Ceres-X, huh.

Interrogation, right.

He looked back into Thor’s eyes and went with his guts. ”So you were there when Steve Rogers was imprisoned on the Moon Base, tell me everything about that.”

Thor chortled. “What’s the matter with your voice, Detective?”

Sergei gritted his teeth. Fuck. Bucky Barnes was only an exhausted whimper at the back of his brain. He needed to pick up the slack, but how could he do it if everybody immediately knew who he was from the tone and accent of his voice?

Fuck.

“Oh.” Thor’s eyes widened. “Oh, the doppelganger, right?” Sergei got ready to retort something, anything really, because he was already fucking annoyed by Barnes and this sharing-a-body thing, but Thor just shook his head and resumed answering questions. “Since I had communicated the meeting point covertly, nobody in the chain of command knew I had tried to spill the beans to Detectives Rogers and Barnes. So, the base commanding officer, General Ross. He’s the same person who has been spearheading the efforts to accrue all the research projects forbidden by Space Law. General Ross gave me an order early that morning to go check on a prisoner. I saw Rogers. At some point, I noticed that he had managed to weaken the reinforced partition keeping him prisoner, but I decided not to alert command and covered his efforts by messing with the surveillance team regularly. That same night, I discreetly entered the medical wing and managed to retrieve some footage of Rogers’ rescue. I watched it and understood how he had managed to weaken a reinforced cell door: wipeout.”

Sergei nodded. “Did you keep—” He stopped abruptly, aware of how weird his voice sounded. It sounded as if two accents were mashed together, as if he was saying both deep and soft consonants with a hoarse and nasal tone. What? “Did you… did you keep that recording?”

Thor looked just as bewildered as he felt, but he tapped his left forearm with his fingers, indicating a silicone-silicium soft PCB printed into his dermis. “Made a copy and downloaded it here.”

Well, that was handy.

“Thank you for—”

At that moment, the door to the bedroom banged open, two very irate men spilling out. Loki looked peevish and Rogers looked aggravated.

Sergei clicked the recorder off.

“Are you done?” Loki exclaimed.

“Hey.” Steve. Rogers. Said more softly, while walking up to Sergei. “We’ve finished. Do you need some more time?”

Sergei shook his head, not answering out loud because he’d seen enough heartbreak on Rogers’ face when they had been in the basement. If he spoke now, Steve would hear that Barnes wasn’t there. He’d be sad, put on a brave face, and Sergei… was a cold man, but not that cold, okay? He was trying. Trying to be someone, because he just couldn’t fathom being a figment, an agglomerate of random memories. He knew he was a person.

Steve gave him a soft smile, ignoring Loki whining at Thor in the background. “Okay, let me call Sam now, we need to regroup.”

Sam?

Sergei puzzled over the name, feeling Bucky cowering in the back of his mind. He felt around Barnes’ idea of “Sam,” which told him that this Sam was…

A good guy.

An annoying guy.

An honest guy.

Sergei tried for a smile, but it felt weird on his face. Steve took this as an assent and made the call. Sergei tuned him out quickly, concentrating on trying to… what? Bring Barnes back? He didn’t want Barnes to take over again, it felt too weird, too much like dying or being put to sleep. But he needed information, something more than gut feelings, he needed something to cover for Barnes, but the guy just fled into the recesses of his brain.

Steve had saved him, both of him, and Sergei couldn’t bear to let him down, for all that they had known each other for barely a day.

A phone was shoved in front of his face.

“Hey, Buck, Sam wants to talk to you,” Steve said offhandedly.

Sergei swallowed and took the phone. Eyes fixed on Steve’s face, he said, “Hi, Sam,” and watched as the light in those blue eyes dimmed.

Fuck.

“Barnes, how are you doing?”

Sergei clenched his jaw, released it, and tried to put a smile in his voice, which sounded fake as fuck. “Fine. What’s up?”

“You still sound rough, man. Anyway, you wanna see your sister? Tell her you’re alive?”

His sister. _Боже мой, Елена_.

Thank all fucks above and beyond. “Oh my god, is Yelena here?”

“… Who?”

Shit. Of course. Yelena was in Yekaterinburg.

Sergei’s jaw worked as if he were grinding glass, and Steve tried to steal the phone right from his ear, but Sergei was having none of it and gripped his arm tight — Bucky wouldn’t do this, Bucky wouldn’t, but Bucky could fucking shut up, he wasn’t in the cockpit right now.

“Sorry, was thinking about a perp. When can I go see her?”

“Man, you sound like shit.” _Well, thank you, Sam Whoever, for your honesty._ “Okay, then we’ll go to Becca’s after your reunion with Phillips. She’s got all your stuff, you’ll need it.”

“Great.” How should he react? As if Sam had agreed to help him meet Yelena, he guessed. “Tell her I missed her. I… fucking missed her a whole lot.”

Sam’s voice got unmistakably softer. “Yeah, you got it, buddy.”

Sergei said his goodbyes and then held the phone out for Steve, giving him an apologetic grimace. Steve held his gaze the whole time he was wrapping up his conversation with that Sam guy, and when he hung up the phone, he hesitated only half a second before wrapping a very surprised Sergei in his spindly arms — oh wow, was the guy skinny.

“I’m sorry you miss your sister.”

Sergei immediately melted and hugged him back.

“What if I’m not real like you said and I never see her again?”

Steve forewent any platitudes and just hugged him tighter.

“I’m not Bucky, Steve,” he said, choking up.

“Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get a hug,” Steve replied, just as choked up.

* * *

Getting to Phillips’ house ended up being shockingly easy. Although the house was in one of the nicest parts of the colony, over on the far edge of segment five, the simple fact that Steve and Loki could manipulate electronics and camera feeds transformed the trek into a cakewalk. They took the tram and hid part of their faces with respiratory masks. At first, this went a long way towards hiding their faces, but after segment three, the people they passed on the street didn’t generally spend much time in the vicinity of the spaceport district. People weren’t augmented in this segment, so with their masks and implants, they went very quickly from non-threateningly incognito to conspicuously different. Steve and Loki spent the whole time staring at the cameras, changing the feeds to make sure they wouldn’t appear. At some point Thor had covertly asked how they were doing it, and their answers had been the vaguest load of bullshit Sergei had ever heard.

For his part, Sergei had just leant his head on the glass window of the tram, staring blindly at the cityscape passing them by and the sliver of dark space he could see above the cityline.

A small sliver of Earth was hanging there in the giant window, and it elicited a deep turmoil in his mind — Sergei’s yearning for his home on Earth contrasted with Bucky’s overwhelming fear of deep space. Sergei swallowed with difficulty and brought his hand to the window, reaching for the small image of Earth. Where was home when part of your mind was in foreign territory, and when another part of you couldn’t look at the sights outside its home, couldn’t look at space, without a reflexive recoil of fear? Sergei remembered an asteroid, he remembered a sky so black it could swallow you whole, he remembered Earth, icy winters, sweltering summers.

He didn’t want to do this, he didn’t want to be here, in this strange body. “ничего не понимаю, Елена,” Sergei murmured to the glass window, feeling himself curl into a ball. Curl curl curl…

“Hey.” Bucky startled and looked at Steve, feeling like Sergei had retreated from the forefront of his mind. “We’re nearly there.”

Bucky nodded slightly, discombobulated by the fuzzy memories of not quite being aware of anything for a long time, and grabbed Steve’s hand where it was laying on the tram bench. For him, he’d just astral planed through an hour of his life, and gone from Loki’s flat to this tram seat.

“Nearly where?” Bucky rasped, confused.

Steve looked down, then up into Bucky’s eyes. Half of his face was hidden, but his eyes looked like he was computing complex mathematics. “Phillips’ house.” Bucky stared into Steve’s eyes. “Bucky?” Bucky nodded.

The tram stopped and Steve stood up, taking Bucky’s hand with him. He wasn’t sure he would ever be able to let go. At Loki’s snarky, “Are we there yet?” Steve snorted and answered, “Come on, this is our stop.” Bucky let himself be dragged, listless, tethered only thanks to Steve’s warm dry hand clasping his.

As they walked out into the late evening sunshine, the blinding light of day beginning to fade with the retraction of the colony mirrors, they took a moment to reorient themselves, standing in the middle of the street with posh passersby milling around them. A young man with a baby made a wide detour just to avoid them, his eyes transfixed by Loki and Steve.

Bucky huffed and fiddled with Steve’s jacket collar to hide more of his spine, but froze when he saw the strange tinge of the skin around the implant. Was he rejecting the—

“Okay, so his home should be two streets over, number twelve, Lagrange Avenue.” Steve started walking, not waiting for Bucky to figure out what was wrong. Fuck, another Big Talk was long overdue.

They didn’t have far to walk, but Bucky was still trying to wade through the fifty thousand questions he had about what the fuck was wrong with Steve’s implants. What an asshole, he hadn’t even told Bucky something was wrong! Or maybe nothing was wrong? What the fuck had he done?

Or, oh shit, maybe it had something to do with what the military had done to him?

Oh god. Steve.

His rising panic called Sergei back to the surface, and holy fuck, this was not the time. Not a good time, buddy!

Bucky was still in the throes of his internal crisis, unbeknownst to the rest of the group, when they finally reached Phillips’ house. Bucky looked back at Thor and Loki, who were watching the surroundings dispassionately. Thor in particular seemed very unimpressed by the wide-open streets and greenery, and the cry of a child in the distance made Loki roll his eyes and whine, “Ugh, children.”

Well.

Steve didn’t have to knock twice, the door opened so quick, he was left with his fist raised before Sam dragged him across the threshold with a hug.

And then… dragged Bucky in with a goddamn hug, too.

“Uhhh…” Bucky hesitantly put his hands on Sam’s arms and tried to extract himself before he got squeezed to death. “Let’s… go inside, man?” Bucky was uncomfortable. What the hell. Last time he’d seen Sam, they had had a tense moment about Bucky foolishly embarking on his quest to find out what Steve had been investigating. The last call had been him tersely asking Sam to seek out Phillips.

Bucky didn’t know how he could face Sam, not with all the shit he’d done. Actually he wasn’t sure how to face Steve half the time, too.

Bucky flinched, and fled through the doorway when Sam released his hold.

“Sorry, Bucky. Yeah, go on in.” Sam apologised right as he gestured for Loki and Thor to come in, too.

_I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here, I don’t—_

Sergei found himself in a big foyer. Barnes’ voice felt more distinct, but panicked and guilty. He took a second to orient himself, and took advantage of the fact that he could hear Barnes more clearly in his mind to get a better sense of what was happening, what was expected of him. He could hear Loki and Thor coming through the door while Steve and Sam had a hushed conversation in the entryway.

“Barnes!” a voice barked from a room which must be… a dining room? That voice. He knew the voice, he thought. Or more like, Barnes knew the voice.

“Uh.” Sergei felt caught like a deer in headlights. The owner of the voice stepped into the hall; he looked on the young side of middle-aged, maybe fifty. Frowning, not amiable, but concerned. He was stout, strong with a bit of a paunch. He looked like someone who had the patience for exactly zero bullshit, and would kick your ass if you even thought about beating around the idea of a bush.

“In here.” The man whirled around and went back inside the room, and now Sergei was trapped between that overly familiar Sam guy, the misfit duo, Steve, and Grouch McGrump. Fuck. He wasn’t the type to hand out nicknames left and right. He felt his warring personalities right there on the surface, and he felt indecisive. Who was he, what should he do?

A hand on his shoulder startled him again — he really needed to work on his spatial awareness, or maybe just awareness in general? — Steve was right there, looking concerned. Sergei gave him a lopsided grin, and Steve reached for the clasp of the mask behind Sergei’s head.

Hands approached on each side of his head and—

Sergei. Bucky.

Bucky brusquely shoved Steve away and stumbled backwards. _Oh no, please don’t erase me. Don’t. Please please please_ “Bucky!” _no non onononon I don’t want to disappear._

“Bucky, Bucky it’s okay, it’s alright.”

“Rogers, what the fuck is going on?”

Bucky was only vaguely aware that he wasn’t breathing right and that people were getting agitated above him. Above? Oh dear.

“Steve, take his mask off, he can’t breathe right.”

Bucky shook his head. “Okay,” he croaked out. Around him people stopped talking so much, and Steve was right in front of him. The parquet floor felt cool under his fingers. Sight, sound, touch. “I’m okay.” Bucky reached shakily for his mask and undid the clasp. Blessedly cool air hit the lower half of his face. “Okay.”

Steve’s hands kind of fluttered around him, like he didn’t know what to do, so Bucky caught them.

“Bucky?”

Bucky nodded, breathing in big gulps of air.

“Okay. So, no… touching your neck, I guess?” Steve asked hesitantly.

Bucky huffed a strangled laugh. “Yeah. Let’s… not do that.”

Phillips was standing in the dining room entrance, watching them with shrewd eyes. He disappeared inside. As they got up, Sam motioned them into the dining room, pushing Thor and Loki through the doorway, too.

As they finally gathered in the room, everyone sitting except Sam,who elected to stand behind Steve and Bucky like a guardian. Bucky was slowly gaining back some semblance of stability. Phillips opened the conversation with an accusatory glare at Steve, of all people.

“Not so dead, Rogers?”

Well, Bucky had kind of missed Phillips’ sunny disposition and winsome attitude. Steve simply huffed out a laugh. “I tried my best, Commissioner. Sorry, didn’t stick.”

“Detective Disaster Area.” Phillips shook his head, looking peeved. “Barnes.” Bucky sat up straight, like he’d been called on to give an answer in the classroom. Silence weighed on the room as Phillips looked like he was mulling over his words. “I’m sorry.”

What. “What?” Bucky looked at Steve, but his face was, for once, unreadable.

“As you should be,” Steve groused.

“Steve?”

Phillips raised a hand, stalling Bucky, who felt the bones in his hand grind together when Steve clenched his own hand. “Rogers, let me at least say my part.” Steve’s face took on a decidedly mulish air. “Barnes, I owe you an apology. The detective administration, what am I saying, the whole of Lost and Found owe you an apology. I knew something was amiss, I wanted to ferret out what crazy plans Lukin had, and Rogers had just disappeared, and with him, all his knowledge, all his leads. I knew you were bad off, but thought that as bad as Lukin could go, he’d never go further than some petty crime, and maybe forging papers, maybe record tampering. I underestimated him, and thus, I underestimated the danger you were getting into.”

Silence fell again, and Bucky was at a loss for what to say. Beside him, Steve looked only half vindicated.

“But I… asked for the transfer. I…”

Phillips shook his head. “No, son, you were crying for help in a self-destructive way. I thought…” He chuffed a humourless laugh. “Who cares what I thought, Barnes, I miscalculated first, and everything went tits up much too fast for me to help.”

Bucky opened and closed his mouth several times. Did Phillips ever apologise? Was this a fever dream? Would there be a hit taken out on their heads once they left the room so that no one alive could attest to Phillips having admitted to a mistake?

“Just.” Phillips made a jerky gesture with his hand. “Just fucking accept the apology and move on, son.”

Bucky nodded like a puppet. “Yes, yes, sir, okay.”

Loki snorted.

“Awesome.” Steve got ready to talk but Phillips nailed his mouth shut with a single glare. “Moving on.” Phillips turned his attention to Thor, like the laser pointer of a very prickly rifle. “Who the fuck are you?”

Thor regaled his audience with a sunny grin. “Captain Thor Odinson, sir, or soon to be ex-captain Thor Odinson, heh.” He shrugged and Loki rewarded the admission that he would be demoted with a pat on the head that couldn’t be interpreted as anything other than _good boy_.

Bucky rolled his eyes, in sync with Sam.

Phillips seemed to hesitate over which line of questioning to pursue next. He had that face he sported every time the Phillips-to-bozos ratio was lower than one. His nostrils flared, and he shifted the conversation to another topic.

“Let’s start with something easy. Does any one of you have light to shed on the CamSec clusterfuck? Cameras on the fritz, looping images, seems like a high-level hacker has managed to infiltrate the system, and since you two always seem to be elbow deep in whatever tomfoolery is going down on this station…”

By his side, Steve was looking sheepish to end all sheeps, and it was Loki who answered smugly, “Detective Rogers and I have both been inadvertently or intentionally inoculated with an experimental nanomaterial which gave us enhancements, amongst which are some limited abilities regarding the manipulation of machines and electronics.”

Phillips sighed and pointed at Steve and Bucky. “Is that in relation with that thing you found during your investigation into Ahmed’s murder? Wilson here gave me a rundown of what happened to you, Rogers. And by that, I mean a better rundown than your shoddy thirty-second call to say you were alive.”

Steve flushed in embarrassment. His reports were legendarily bad, which had been the whole reason Bucky had always written most of them. “Yes, the experimental nanomaterial was the one in Ahmed’s case. Wipeout.”

Phillips hung his head, then pulled his tablet over in front of him, poked at it for a bit, signed something with a flourish, and then pushed the tablet aside again. “Case reopened; I’m putting Dugan on this. All right. What’s next.” He looked at Sam. “After we had a talk, you said you needed to get something for me from wherever. What was it?”

Sam, who had been standing, leaning back on the wall, arms crossed, tossed something onto the table.

Bucky leaned over to look at it and, oh. “Oh! I. Damn.” He took the data key. It was the one with the two scratch marks… “Where did you find this, Sam?”

“Becca told me you brought Alpine to her apartment four days ago, disoriented and not making much sense. That key was strapped to Alpine’s collar.”

“Four days,” Bucky murmured wonderingly, turning the key over. He pushed it towards Phillips. “This should contain what I found while digging through records. There’s proof that Rollins is fucking with them. I think I told you some of this, well that’s the evidence. There are also recordings of Vice team meetings; that should be enough to show motive, Commissioner. I don’t think everyone’s dirty, but they all sure as shit drank up Lukin’s words without spilling a drop. I… I wish I had more but don’t remember everything of what happened while I was undercover…”

“Commissioner, they implanted Bucky with an illegal chip, fake memories,” — Bucky felt the part of him that was Sergei rebelling against the idea that he was fake — “self-propagating brain implant, a darkbox! I have proof…” Steve patted himself and slapped a data card onto the table. “Here, everything the chip parlour gave me. He wasn’t responsible. Did Romanova call you?”

Bucky shivered, feeling distraught for a lot of reasons, not all of the reasons coming from him.

“She did. As you can see, I’m trying to untangle the pile of threads you both have been dumping on my lap for days on end.” He threw a glance at Sam. “You three.”

“Lukin tried to use Bucky to plant evidence, people all over segment one have been saying he’s pulled his team from cutting down on trafficking, and he has an axe to grind with transhumans for stupid reasons. Bucky was supposed to die, Romanova would have been set up in an officer shooting, and fuck!” Steve was getting worked up, but Bucky couldn’t help him reign in his temper, for once. “Commissioner, I think he was trying to build public mistrust against implanted people, Lukin is _evil_! He should be fucking sent to dig holes on Ceres forever!” Sam put his left hand on Steve’s shoulder, trying to calm him down.

Bucky was supposed to die?

He’d planted evidence?

Bucky raked through his mind in search of when, and what, and how, as the rest of the room devolved into a curt argument starring Steve wanting to simply catapult the whole lot of Vice onto Jupiter’s orbit and Loki stepping in to say that he would like to send SAF there, too, if the orbit wouldn’t be too crowded. Oh my god, did those two never shut up? Bucky had, oh my god, Jessica Jones? Was it him who had framed Jessica Jones?

_Sergei please._

“It was the perfect set up.” Everybody fell silent at Sergei’s words. “Barnes’ partner died seemingly at the hand of a smuggling operation gone wrong. He’s unstable, gets into bad shit and ends up dead at the hands of transhumans? Lukin wanted evidence planted to make the cybs look bad, and he would have had Bucky take the fall for everything, blaming his state of mind all the way.” Sergei drummed his fingers on the table. “By the end, Bucky Barnes would have been either dead because of this scheme, or brain-dead because of the darkbox. No way he’d have been able to defend himself.”

The silence extended sufficiently long for Sergei to understand that everyone was still reeling from him taking over, and wasn’t that fucking great? He clenched his jaw, furious on Barnes’ behalf, furious with Barnes for leaving him in the pilot seat again, furious with himself for not being able to read the room. Furious for so many reasons that he couldn’t be bothered to identify them all. He disentangled his hand from Steve’s because it made him uncomfortable, and the betrayed look he set Sergei only added to the furious pile.

Phillips looked at Steve. “What’s this?” He pointed at Sergei accusatorily.

Steve gnawed on his lip. “Aftereffects of the darkbox implant.”

“Right.” Phillips’ nostrils flared, again. “So. Barnes.”

“Smerdyakov.”

“Who the fuck ever.” _Fucker._ “You joined their team, so if we had investigated, we would have thought of you first, and then since you were part of Vice, I’m sure our detectives would have thought the head of Vice had something to do with all this evidence tampering.”

“Barnes was only recently transferred, they could easily say it was all the new guy’s fault that way. Plus, Steve had died, they could have blamed trauma with no problem.”

“How could he make you plant evidence?”

“Coercion through codewords. I think Rollins might have been his first test subject. Don’t know what went wrong with m—” Sergei stopped himself, realising something. He leaned over to look at Loki, who was sitting back in his chair, arms behind his head and staring at the ceiling. “You fucking bitch. _You_ made my implant glitch!” Sergei hissed.

Loki’s chair clacked when it dropped back down onto all four legs. “Oh, I beg your pardon, but do you want me to be sorry for getting a hit in before you put a gun to my head? Or would you like to thank me for frying part of the chip so that the self-replicating wiring would stall?” Loki touched his heart with his hand. “I know, I’m generous like that.”

Steve smacked the table with his fist. “You didn’t prevent this, Loki, you made it fucking worse!”

Loki snorted. “Right. By the way, quick question, would you rather have your implant glitch so much that you had to get it taken out, or have your implant stay pure and pristine and both of your lads,” — Loki made a circle with his index finger, pointing to his temple — “old chap number one and old chap number two, be slowly erased into a blank slate? Because that’s what you were heading for.”

“How the fuck would you know!?” Steve threw his hands in the air as Sergei considered the fact that he might be “fake,” but he could just as soon have been dead.

“Steve, I’m sorry, but aren’t you the one who can _hear_ implants? Do I really have to explain to you how I knew this thing was a time bomb?”

“You didn’t defuse it, you set it off!”

“You must have me confused with someone who gave a damn about your friend there.”

“SILENCE!” Phillips roared and both Steve and Loki shut up, adopting twin mulish expressions. Sergei bit his lip, shaken by what Loki had said. He could have been captive to the cold. To that weird space he and Bucky had retreated to when there had been…

A new mission.

New orders.

Bucky held his head between his hands, staring at the table and avoiding everybody’s eyes.

“All right. Rogers.”

“Yes.”

“You interrogated these two clowns?”

“Yes, sir.” Bucky heard something click on the table, most likely the records of their interrogations.

“Good. Barnes.”

Bucky looked at Phillips through his fingers. “Sir?”

“Don’t look at me like I kicked your puppy. You’re a victim, not up for adoption in a kennel. I’ll need you to give a full statement to Dugan. And I’m bringing in Morita and Jones.” Phillips’ ever-present scowl eased up, which was both a sight to behold and a sign of how pitiable Bucky must have looked. “You tell them everything you can, so they can bring everything up to L and F Oversight. This is going to get ugly and climb way up high.” Phillips looked up at Sam. “You.”

“Not ‘you,’ I’m Dr. Sam Wilson, sir, remember?”

“That’s good, I like people who have names. Wilson, you told me you were a shrink?”

“Yeah?”

“Okay, what’s the standard leave of absence before a detective goes back on duty? Were those times respected in Barnes’ case?”

“What was his request for leave of absence filed under?”

Bucky hid behind his fingers again. He felt Steve’s hand rubbing his back, and nothing had ever felt better. He remembered, in another lifetime, a doctor telling him to hold her hand — a lifeline.

“Use of a service weapon, generalised stress, work partner loss,” Phillips replied tersely.

“See, as far as I know, under those terms, I think the standard rules were respected, sir. And I know Dr. Temple. She wouldn’t have released Bucky any earlier than necessary. But I think two things went wrong. First, he was cut off from his safety net because he got filed under needing recovery for implant rejection. Second, he just wasn’t addressed to us under the right traumas, is all.”

Steve’s hand stopped rubbing. “Sam.”

“Go on, Dr. Wilson.”

“Sam, don’t.” Oh my, Bucky sure hoped Sam wasn’t going to spill the beans on Steve’s and Bucky’s… thing, whatever it was, after everything that had happened.

“Sir, I think you know how long Bucky and Steve have known each other. You should have filed Bucky’s request under loss of next of kin.”

Steve exhaled shakily and resumed rubbing Bucky’s back. Bucky opened his fingers just enough to spy on Phillips’ face. He looked caught off guard and then irate, which was one of the two reactions to things that surprised him — the second one being throwing the surprise out of his office with great prejudice.

“All right, then, Doctor. Call that Dr. Temple, do your thing, and make a new, full assessment so that I can, this time, make the correct requests. I’ll sign whatever I need to.” Phillips was now standing, leaning on his fists on the table, looming like nobody’s business. Bucky hid behind his fingers again for no reason other than he and Sergei and all the shattered parts of himself were getting more and more overwhelmed by the minute.

“What’s this thing about military prison, Rogers?”

Steve’s hand stopped again, and Bucky turned his head to peek pointedly at Steve, who was looking for all intents and purposes like he was planning tactical evasion manoeuvres; he ended up pointing at Thor, who raised his hands in surrender. “I didn’t jail you, mate.”

“Yeah, but you are — were — a captain, and I was in a coma, so who’s more up to speed on what the fuck is wrong with SAF, huh?”

Loki elbowed Thor forcefully and Thor winced, before turning to Phillips. “Okay, so, I told whatever I could to Detective Barnes, all right?” It was Bucky’s turn to wince because he knew he hadn’t been… all there for it. Luckily, Phillips wasn’t looking at him at the moment. “The SAF has been operating separately from the colony government for quite a while now. We have no Oversight Office, like Medical does, or Lost and Found, or… I don’t know. And about half the chain of command is still made up of Earthers and have ties to one government or another dirtside.”

“What he means is that recyclers and farmers have more eyes on them than the fucking army,” Loki pointed out huffily.

“Yeah. That. So. Uh.” Thor scratched his cheek confusedly. “Anyway, ever since SAF got involved in research led by the University, when funding or personnel is pulled, we are sent to take over, grab all the stuff we can without raising suspicion, and send it back to base instead of destroying it. On the Moon. With that latest metamaterial nanotechnology, sorry, wipeout“ — Thor amended his words when Loki angrily corrected him in a hushed voice. — “when they pulled the plug on wipeout research, General Ross asked us to retrieve everything. All of it. Some had been set aside by Martina Ahmed, and the rookies sent to get it from her were trigger-happy newbies. I knew a shipment was supposed to be sent on April twentieth, Ross sent a note. You know what happened and the shipment was never retrieved, it seems like someone else other than our good detectives and SAF was alerted to our presence…”

“Oh yeah, that would have been my fault, sorry,” Loki interjected breezily.

And now Bucky wasn’t the only one hiding behind his hand, although Thor’s gesture might be better described as an epic facepalm. “Doe, why didn’t you tell me…”

“When I asked you to come see me? Oh sorry, what was it you said to me? Oh yeah!” Loki snapped his fingers. “I can help you get into SAF if you fear those two soldiers will rat you out.”

Bucky saw the exact moment that Thor decided not to not touch that subject with a ten-foot pole, and turned back to Phillips to finish his story. “I was on the ship and we were supposed to get the last wipeout shipment, but instead we got a floater. When we managed to catch him, lo and behold, we discovered he was a detective, an officer! We received orders to revive him, and when one of the doctors shocked Rogers with the defibrillator, well… he… I mean first he turned grey, and yeah. Rogers was in a coma, and Major Hill was in command and decided to jail him until new orders came through. As he was still recovering, the request went all the way up the chain of command. General Ross said to keep him for interrogation until further notice.”

The following silence was so thick it could only be described as “dot dot dot,” really. Phillips was still leaning on his fists, as nice as a jail door.

“You realise how bad this looks, son.”

Oh god, he called Thor “son”.

“Well, sir, I guess that’s why I deserted.”

“And you, Dr. Wilson? Got anything you’d like to expose? Big pyramid scheme in Medical? Did they try to hide the existence of aliens when the Microbiology Surveillance System was disrupted last year?”

Sam smiled, all teeth. “Nope. All good on our front. But I’ll make sure to pass on the questions to my administration.”

Phillips snorted. Then he simply left the room, turning and going through a door behind him. Steve and Bucky, who had finally stopped hiding his face in his hands, leaned to the side in unison to try and see what Phillips was doing. Seemed like he was in some sort of study and Bucky took a minute to admire how large the house was. It had a whole _separate_ room for office work and stuff?

Phillips came back quickly and tossed two pairs of electronic keys with a card taped on them onto the table. “Your respective flats.” He jotted something down on his tablet, then thrust the tablet in Thor’s face. “The form for protective custody. Sign here.” Thor blinked up at Phillips, then quickly signed the tablet. Phillips swiped to another form and pushed the tablet towards Loki. “Sign here.”

The same thing was repeated for Steve and then Bucky, who had a momentary urge to ask if he needed to sign the same form for Sergei, too.

Phillips took his tablet back and glared at everyone.

“Commissioner?” Steve asked hesitantly.

“What are you all still doing in my dining room? Go on, get.”

Bucky and Steve, being used to their dear temperamental Chester, scrambled out of their chairs and more or less took Sam by the arm, while Loki and Thor were still sitting there dumbstruck.

“What do you mean, get?” Loki asked, a bit miffed.

“Wait, you’re not a native Island speaker?” Phillips gestured at the room. “This is my house.” He vaguely waved towards Loki and Thor. “And that’s you, needing to vacate the premises so that I can enjoy my coffee.” Since they still weren’t budging, Phillips insisted. “ _Alone_.”

“What about our complaints about SAF? The whole jail thing!” Thor said, gaping.

“Right.” In the entryway, Bucky and Steve had slowed down to put their jackets on and were very conspicuously spying on the proceedings. “I had forgotten you were civilians.” At Thor’s indignant gasp, he doubled down. “ _Newly minted civilians_. You’re assigned a flat by the government. Colony services will come and check in on you since you are now officially witnesses. Detectives will be over, and you may be asked at any time to come forward and help the investigation. Investigations, plural. Meanwhile, I think you can expect a whole slew of suspensions every which way in the next few weeks or months.” Then he turned his baleful stare towards Steve and Bucky, their heads popped through the doorway, watching the events unfold. “What are you two clowns still doing here?”

They both squeaked out a “Sorry, sir,” and finished putting their jackets on, running out the door under Sam’s judgy eyebrows.

As they walked into the soft glow of sunset, hearing Loki and Thor getting ready, too, Bucky examined the keys and the address on the cards. Segment two. Eh. Felt like home. He frowned. Wasn’t Sergei from Segment two? No, he had lived on an asteroid.

Sam patted him on the back, startling him out of his thoughts.

“Let’s go swing by Becca’s so you can say hi and get your stuff.”

Bucky cringed internally.

Oh my God.

Becca.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Russian translations, still courtesy of the best of the best need_for_meta:
> 
>   * ничего не понимаю, Елена: [nichego ne ponimayu], I’m confused, lit. I don't understand anything, Yelena
> 



	11. Space Weathering

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein anguish, healing and a kiss happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The flavour of Dissociative Identity Disorder Bucky/Sergei has is completely fictional. I have inspired myself slightly from some symptoms, but bear in mind that this very real mental disorder in no way "fades" or is made of "constructs" like I allude here.
> 
> Also, my dear beta let me handwave _one thing_ as a **treat**. I leave you to try and find it, lmao.

### Part III, Chapter 11: Space Weathering

Space weathering is the type of weathering that occurs to any object exposed to the harsh environment of outer space. Bodies without atmospheres (including the Moon, Mercury, the asteroids, comets, and most of the moons of other planets) take on many weathering processes:

  * collisions of galactic cosmic rays and solar cosmic rays,
  * irradiation, implantation, and sputtering from solar wind particles, and
  * bombardment by different sizes of meteorites and micrometeorites.



Space weathering is important because these processes affect the physical and optical properties of the surface of many planetary bodies. Therefore, it is critical to understand the effects of space weathering in order to properly interpret remotely sensed data.

`— Wikipedia, “Space weathering”`

Byzantine, that’s the only word available in any human language to describe the sheer magnitude of space Colony administrations. As the saying goes, “Bureaucracy grows to satisfy the growing needs of a growing bureaucracy,” and Spacers took that one sentence and ran with it. Have been running with it ever since they first set foot on the Moon.

The main exports from the Space colonies are scientific research data, minerals, metals, nanomaterials, and cows. (You can’t produce enough milk for a whole colony without a few calving cows, but with so many cows farting in an enclosed space, you can only keep a balanced ecosystem for so long.) Industries and production do exist in Space, and their economy is, astoundingly, stable. However, the last census showed that nearly a third of the Spacer population was employed by an Administration, in one way or another.

The largest Administrations are Lost and Found, which oversees detective work, lost objects, and recycling, and Medical, which has its hands full dealing with the copious Spacer mental health problems and the very high incidence of sun radiation-induced cancers and serious accidents with heavy machinery. Space is a dangerous place. 

Then you have Cloudy Skies, who retained the cute nickname created back when they were just a group of scientists projecting images of clouds in the fledgling Moon Base rec rooms. Cloudy Skies oversees the climate controls of all the stations, colonies, and bases. Even spaceships roaming the skies, from salvage ships to scientific outposts, report to Cloudy Skies with their environmental controls: heat, humidity, air cleanliness, gas composition.

Your average Spacer Jax has to fill out an average of six forms every two months for anything from the census to roommate situations and leaky pipes. They’ll have over half of their paycheck go to the government for redistribution. An average Spacer will belong to 3.2 Unions in their lives, spend 0.5% of their lives in shrink appointments, and recycle seventy-eight tons of rubbish before they die.

`— Ari Þorgilsson, “Space economy”`

By common accord, they had decided that Sam would be the one to knock on Becca’s door, since he was the only level-headed person in the trio. They’d walked briskly to Becca’s from Phillips’ house, stopping only for a moment so as to call the movers to come get everything Steve and Bucky couldn’t bring with them. Bucky had tried to hang back, climbing the steps to Becca’s flat slowly, but finally they reached the landing and Sam knocked.

And Becca opened her door and…

The cognitive dissonance nearly undid Bucky.

Yelena looked tired. Had she dyed her hair brown? Since when? Last time he’d been in Yekaterinburg she—

Bucky shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, and saw Becca give him a tremulous smile before she launched herself through the doorway and into his arms, sidestepping Sam.

“Oh my god, Bucky.” She wrapped her arms so tight around him, she combed her fingers through his hair, and he felt an instinctual recoil of fear slither through his mind. Yelena — no! Becca! — sniffled and buried her nose in his neck, and then, Sergei couldn’t bear it any further.

Bucky kissed her soft brown hair, her curls, so similar to his, tickling his nose, and then Sergei-oh so-gently extricated himself from the bear hug, holding her at arm's length.

“Bucky?” she whispered, her tone hitting all the shades of heartbreak.

As she stared at him uncomprehendingly, Steve cleared his throat. “Yeah, uh, Becca. Let’s… I’ll explain everything while we get our stuff?” And really, Sergei didn’t know Steve that well, but he was so fucking thankful for the soft, angry toothpick right this instant.

While Steve steered Becca into the house and began recounting their adventures in a hushed voice, Sergei sighed exhaustedly and let himself be herded by Sam into the flat, and then into a spare room that contained several packed-up cardboard boxes. She had a big flat, that was for sure…

Sergei stared dispassionately at the boxes. On the sides were smiley faces asking him to please not forget to recycle, and he felt like they were mocking him. He felt Bucky, still so very close to the surface, and the boxes seemed to be mocking Bucky, too.

“I hate those boxes.”

“What did they ever do to you, Barnes?” Sam snorted. He examined one of the boxes. “Kitchen.” Sergei saw Sam glance at him from the side. “Or Sergei?”

Sergei didn’t answer, but went to check a box of his own without much enthusiasm. “Steve’s room, clothes.” He moved the box into the hallway and took great care not to listen to the hushed conversation and muffled sobs coming from further down the hall.

“So,” Sam said casually. He checked a new box. “Bucky’s room, books and electronics.”

_Ugh._

“How does it feel when you’re Sergei?” Sam huffed when he hoisted the box in his arms. Sergei sidestepped him to go peer at another box.

“I don’t know, how does it feel when you’re Dr. Wilson?”

“Touché. Living room, S and B knick-knacks.” Sam looked pointedly at Sergei.

He shrugged. “I guess it’ll make Steve feel better.”

Sam nodded, took the box outside and came back. “Looks like I don’t have to worry too much about you guys kicking each other’s face in when I’m not there.”

“S and B academia.” Sergei moved that box over to get at the one underneath. “Steve is an okay guy. Steve’s room, personal.”

Sergei stooped to get at the box but was stopped by Sam’s hand on his shoulder. Sergei looked up into Sam’s serious eyes. “Listen, and I’m not joking around, okay? You might be real, you might be fake. You might be Bucky coping or whatever the fuck. But Steve and Bucky? They are the closest thing I know to soulmates, okay? So, whatever you do and whoever you are, you better not spoil what they have. Capice?”

Sergei felt annoyed and shrugged Sam’s hand off his shoulder. “I’m an asshole, but I’m not a homewrecker, man.” He bent over, took the box and went to carry it into the hallway, but Sam blocked his path, which annoyed him even further. “What do you want? A signed affidavit? A blood oath?”

“I wasn’t finished.”

Sergei grunted, irritated, so Sam slammed his hand down on the top of the box that Sergei was holding in order to make his point. Really, Sergei could have held onto the box, because the blow wasn’t _that_ hard, but he was also one hundred and ten percent done with this guy and all these fucking people and this whole situation. He wasn’t fake. And people could also learn to cut him some fucking slack after what he’d been through; he was in this fucking body, too, and the day had been exceedingly long.

So he let the box crash to the ground, because he couldn’t fucking care less and he thought it would make a point.

There was the sound of something breaking sharply. Like glass.

Both Sam and Sergei stared at each other, making the facial equivalent of “oops?” Then they both dived for the box, opening it in a flurry of hands, and getting in each other’s way. Sergei was panicking. This escalated to a lowkey ridiculous hand-slapping match, but Sergei was still panicking and panicking.

Bucky finally managed to get the box open, revealing a mess of random trinkets, unpaired socks, several sketchbooks, and drawing gear. He carefully retrieved the three pieces of a broken ceramic model of the colony, disheartened, the voice in his head hushed, mute, silent, ashamed.

“What’s this?” Sam asked in the softest of voices.

Bucky sat back, and had to clear his throat twice before he was able to speak. “Just a dumbass souvenir I bought him as a joke gift. Ten years ago, I think?”

“Bucky?” Bucky nodded, then shook his head. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to face this or the inevitable heartbreak when Steve was finally fed up with him and all the new baggage he had.

He didn’t want to be here, didn’t, didn’t…

Sergei blinked and looked at Sam owlishly. He and Bucky were switching so quickly, ever since they had seen Yel— Becca. What the fuck was happening? He looked down at his hands, holding the broken trinket, and his heart fell to his feet.

Sam sighed, long-suffering but not unsympathetic. “Sergei?” Sergei nodded. “You see what I was getting at?”

Sergei shrugged.

“You’re both inhabiting this body, and you’re both in this life together. If one of you fucks it up for the other, you won’t just be causing damage to the people around you.” Sam stroked the sharp edges of the broken pieces of ceramic held in Sergei’s hands. “You’ll end up hating yourself, your other self. And what the fuck happens if Bucky hates becoming you? If you despise him and his life?”

Sergei bit his lip, which felt so weird because he recognised it as a Bucky habit. “It’s fucked up, Wilson. It’s all fucked up, anyway.”

“Is touch okay?”

“No, please.” Sergei clenched his jaw and moved the pieces together, trying to see if there were missing bits, maybe he could… repair it?

A gasp in the doorway made both Sam and Sergei look to where Steve and Becca had stopped in the hall. Steve’s eyes were fixed on the broken model pieces.

“I-I’m sorry,” Sergei stammered, and fuck Bucky for evading his best friend, fuck him, fuck their predicament, the switching, the vague memories, the feeling of displacement. Fuck this day, so long and so tiring. “I can get it replaced? Maybe it. It can be replaced?” Sergei saw Steve schooling his features to hide his shock or his hurt, he fucking didn’t know because he wasn’t a people person and what the hell was he gonna do? “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Steve just shook his head and smiled bravely. “It’s okay Sergei, it’s just a… it’s just a decoration.”

Sergei clenched his jaw until it hurt, and after a beat, he shoved the ceramic pieces at Sam, who fumbled with them, and tried to push past Steve and Becca. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to stay here, he needed fresh air.

Becca caught up to him quickly in the hallway and hugged him again, tightly, her embrace warm and unyielding.

“I don’t like to be touched,” he told her, rigid as a wooden board.

“This isn’t touch, okay, it’s a hug. Everybody needs them,” she murmured decisively. “Just, think of me as your sister, okay?”

He hesitantly raised his arms, pressing his hands to her shoulder blades. “Елена?”

“Yes. I’m Yelena.”

Sergei fell into the hug with abandon.

After that, moving the boxes into the hall for the movers to pick up was done in complete silence, none of them willing to speak. Sergei saw how Steve kept the pieces in a smaller box that Yelena — no, Becca — gave him, but said nothing. He saw how when Sam brought the cat stuff and a white cat, everybody turned to him, the room felt full of hesitation and Steve ended up with the cat, while he got the box of cat stuff. As they were finally getting to the end of triaging the boxes, the movers rang, and then they all tried to stay out of their path. They tiptoed around the movers, and tiptoed around Sergei, and tiptoed around Steve.

Once all the boxes had been loaded, the four of them walked down to the ground floor of Becca’s building before they parted ways. Sam hugged Steve tightly, but only patted Sergei on the arm. “Be nice to each other. All of you.”

Becca gave him another long hug and Sergei just thought of Yelena and her soft reddish-blonde hair and her crooked smile and the cold of her home, and then the hug was over.

Steve was the one who opened the door of the new flat and told the movers where to put the boxes. By this point, they were both so bone tired that half the boxes ended up stashed in the middle of the main room. Sergei just walked inside, silent and tired. The flat looked — different — familiar — like a colonist flat — like any apartment, just smaller — with its wide windows, open-plan living room-kitchen-office-dining room combination. Two doors led to the bedrooms. The door across the hall from them led to the smallest of bathrooms, with a toilet so close to the shower you could take a shit and wash yourself at the same time. Glamorous.

The cat zipped through the main room and went to scratch at an empty cabinet until it managed to get inside.

“Hey, Sergei?”

Sergei shook himself out of his contemplation of the cat’s antics and stuck his head into the corridor. “Yeah?”

“Any preference for the bedroom?” Steve was looking… pained? Tired? Who the fuck knew.

“Where was Bucky’s bedroom in your apartment?” Sergei would have slept on a carpet in the main room if there wasn’t a mountain of boxes there.

“Second door?” And why did Steve phrase it like a question? Sergei had no clue.

And he was so very tired, he wasn’t sure he wanted a clue. So he simply nodded, walked to his assigned bedroom with its bed and bare mattress, and crashed, hard.

Fuck the boxes, either he’d move them in the morning or they could well enough move themselves.

And fuck Steve, being all considerate. And Bucky for being real, having a nice life, and fucking off to leave him alone in this shit.

Fuck this.

Fuck all of this.

* * *

When Steve woke up the next morning in his new small bedroom, full of boxes and not much else, he stared at the ceiling for the longest time. On his bedside table sat the three broken pieces of the ceramic colony trinket Bucky had gifted him all those years ago.

It was such a dumb thing, he had nearly forgotten about it. But seeing it cracked in Bucky’s hands had been… the shit cherry on top of the crap cake at the end of the dung pile meal that had been the last…

However long.

Eighty-six days, his dumbass wipeout-brain provided.

The question was, after the obliterating sleep he’d woken from, what the hell was waiting for him outside his bedroom door?

Sergei?

Bucky?

There had been a point when Steve had thought Bucky and Sergei only switched when they sought out memories of things that happened while the other was “away”. But when they had gone to see Becca, he’d thought he’d seen them alternate much quicker than before. Was it the stress? The fatigue? Steve, too, had been drained by yesterday. And waking up at ten was a testament to the exhaustion he had felt.

Shit, but Steve wanted Bucky. He wanted him so very much right now, after everything.

He had had his friend right there, so close, for hours yesterday, and every time, for no fucking reason, he would… switch. Disappear. Lights out. Show’s over. No Bucky, just this cold, hardass man sporting Bucky’s face, constantly frowning, sending stony looks at his surroundings.

Then Bucky would come back, unexpectedly, and Steve would get his hopes up.

To have them crash again.

The longest day.

Steve closed his eyes and listened. He listened to the whale song of the colony, to the soft buzz of the wiring and appliances. He tried to let himself be lulled by all the staticky noises that filled his head at all times, wishing that sounds could drown out his worry.

What if all the moments he would ever get with Bucky had already passed? What if this was it? What if his hands, pushed against a glass door, with Bucky’s face behind a helmet, what if that was the last thing he would ever have? Their last words, last truths spoken, last memories made. What if, from now on, all he would ever have were glimpses, peeks at his friend, a shadow on his face, fleeting minutes only reminiscent of what could be?

Steve took several deep breaths.

What-ifs didn’t offer solutions. Hope was all well and good for getting to sleep at night, but useless and harmful and unfair to Sergei. Sergei was alone, too. He thought he was a person, but not even in the right body, in the right life. He, too, must suffer from heartache.

In a sense, they had kinship in this shared misery.

He just had to fucking buckle up and do his best. Be there for whoever was currently sleeping in the room next to his.

His ma had said, back when she had learned she had cancer, that there was no way out but forwards.

With the heaviest of huffs, Steve got up from the bed and scratched his belly over his nightshirt, right where he had been shot. He yawned so wide he felt his jaw crack, and at the same time heard one of the kitchen appliances wake up with a zingy buzz that resonated in his head. His mouth clamped shut.

He padded to his door, and, not really knowing himself why he was doing this strange ninja shtick, he opened it silently and slipped into the hallway.

Bucky was in the kitchen, in front of the stove, wearing a faded, nondescript t-shirt pilfered from an open box in the middle of the living room and his pyjama pants. The clothes looked a bit creased but not crumpled, so maybe he had changed right before going into the kitchen. Steve spent a second or two trying to guess who was behind the wheel today, but nothing was really giving it away, except for the fact that Bucky wouldn’t be caught dead making breakfast in the Before Times.

No way but forwards.

Steve walked into the kitchen, purposefully loud, and sat at the kitchen counter. “Hey.”

The guy smiled lopsidedly — Bucky? — and said, “Hey. Hot chocolate?” Oh, that raspy tone. Sergei.

Steve tried hard not to feel sorry for himself. He would have liked to have had his best friend, for comfort if nothing else, but here was the hand they were dealt. And here was Sergei presenting him with chocolate like a peace offering, his smile getting tighter around the edges. Steve smiled wide and answered with, “Sure!” Enthusiastic, but not too much.

Of course he wanted chocolate.

“Wasn’t much in the fridge, but still, I figured, hot chocolate for breakfast and then we could see whatever can be ordered or…” Sergei trailed off, shrugging as he put two bowls on the counter and then took the pot off the stove. “I don’t know, should we check if we can go grocery shopping?”

Steve hummed his assent, watching as Sergei poured the hot chocolate into both bowls with minimal spillage. When he finished, he grumbled as he noticed the spot of milk on the counter. “Fuck.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it.” Steve first swiped his finger through the milk and sucked it off, and as Sergei grabbed a rag to clean up the spill, Steve just leaned over and slurped the milk up from the counter.

“Боже мой! Steve, gross! Couldn’t you wait?” Sergei exclaimed, and in that moment, although the words were partly in Russian, he also sounded so much like Bucky, echoing so many other times that Bucky had cried out in the same exasperated wail, that Steve just grabbed him from the other side of the counter and _clung_.

Sergei took some time getting there, but after awkwardly shifting the bowls to the side, he clung to Steve, too.

“You know I’m not Bucky right now?”

“Yeah. But there’s enough of him in you.”

Silence fell. Sergei seemed to make a conscious effort to relax and hug back as well as he could.

“You love him, huh?” Steve felt Sergei’s rumbling voice against his ear, his head tucked tightly against Sergei’s collarbone.

“Yes,” he whispered. This was still a secret for him. Nobody knew, nobody had known but him and Bucky, as he had died.

Sergei sighed. “He’s in there. He’ll come out eventually.”

“Thank you.” Steve answered, choked up.

“You’re all awfully huggy people, you know?” Steve hummed noncommittally. Sergei awkwardly patted his back. “I like you, but I kinda hate this. Please kick his ass for putting me on the spot when he shows up again?”

Steve snort-giggled, and neither of them pointed out how watery his laugh was. “Yeah, you bet I will.”

* * *

In the next few days, they progressively settled into a routine. Neither Steve nor Sergei had anything better to do than “get better.” As for Bucky, Steve was progressively getting more and more frustrated.

Dugan and Claire Temple came several times, the former in the morning to get detailed depositions on some specific points of the whole slew of cases that had been opened, or reopened, and catapulted onto his desk. The latter always came in the afternoon, around three, with something sugary to eat. Bucky, who had often been partially coaxed out during the long interrogation sessions, would make an appearance again for a croissant or a bag of chouquettes, and while he was scarfing them down, Claire would take advantage of his appearance to worm anything she could out of him.

During all of this, Steve tried to hang around at the edges. The first day, every time he so much as came into view, Bucky would blink owlishly and then switch back to Sergei, to the frustration of everybody in the room. Bucky was becoming increasingly less “shy,” however much it wasn’t a question of shyness. Claire had taken some time to explain that it seemed like Bucky may have had a lot of trauma to process in relation to Steve, and that’s what was causing his weird flight reflex.

She’d said his case was very specific, something similar to dissociative identity disorder. It wasn’t exactly that, but close enough in some of the symptoms to be used as a close comparison.

When pressed about what Steve could do and how the fuck he was supposed to help Bucky process when the guy wouldn’t even face him, Claire had gently patted his arm and answered that right now, being aware of the problem was already a good start.

A good start. A big fat lot of good that did him.

A week after they moved in saw Steve stirring eggs aggressively in a pan, feeling a bit peevish. A lot peevish.

He just wanted two fucking minutes, uninterrupted, with no life-or-death emergency, no files, no doctor, no Sergei. After a week of finally getting some sleep, taking walks to the park to counter the feeling of being locked up, and basically cooling his heels while the whole of VCU was focused on tying up all the loose ends of their cases… Steve could put all his hyperfocus to no good use whatsoever.

He was so antsy, he was one step away from fidgeting himself into the sun.

He added pepper and parsley and listened close to check if Sergei was waking up.

Because Sergei was also a whole other can of worms that Steve wished he didn’t need to open again and again every day.

The guy was sweet, if grumpy, but Steve was okay with grumpy. He was a grumpy motherfucker, himself. Sergei was like… the broodier version of Bucky. He also had all the wrong tells and couldn’t read a room for shit. He was worse than Steve at reading people which was… uncanny. Strange. Weird. When Dugan first came around, he had seemed cautious, surely warned ahead of time by Phillips, and Sergei had confused this with anger? Steve had had to bring him into his bedroom and first give him a dressing down for being so aggressive to Dum Dum. Dugan was trying to _help_ them, goddamnit. Then he had had to explain that, “No, Dugan isn’t here to indict, and what the fuck Sergei, what gave you the idea that ‘Okay, guys, I’ll need you to work with me, this is a shitshow’ was in any way _aggressive_?”

Steve sighed and tossed the scrambled eggs one last time, adding some bits of gruyère at the end.

Sergei had zero patience, where Bucky had truckloads of it. Bucky felt like a cat, not unlike Alpine, whereas Sergei… felt like a sweet, kind of leery… ferret. Maybe.

Steve missed Bucky.

He missed him like an Earther would miss the sky. Like Steve would miss the axis. Like you miss sunshine and soft rain.

There was the click of a door opening as Steve plated the scrambled eggs with two spoons of chickpea paste and a good chunk of goat cheese. “Hey!” he called, already prepared to see Bucky with that strange jaw-clench mannerism Sergei had. Now it seemed like a natural thing after seeing Bucky’s… body do this for days on end.

“Heya, Stevie,” came Bucky’s voice.

And it was Bucky’s voice. Bucky’s deep tone, the rasp, no nasal sounds, everything. Steve just knew.

“Bucky?” he asked incredulously. He was standing there, in pyjama bottoms, Alpine in his arms purring like a spacecraft engine.

Bucky cringed. “Yeah. It’s… me?”

They stayed standing there like two startled meerkats, gazing at each other and not making a move, not even when Alpine jumped down, oblivious to his human’s moment of distress. Steve had the sudden urge to both hug and strangle Bucky. He had fled from Steve, disappeared and left him with a stranger to deal with the fallout, and here he… just came back? All shirtless and repentant, like it was no big deal?

Bucky looked like he’d rather be anywhere else in the whole cosmos, so when he saw the still-warm eggs, he sort of scuttled over to the counter like an apologetic crab. “Oh, smells nice, Steve.”

“Smells nice,” Steve scoffed. He sat down and pushed one fork over to Bucky, who sat down, too.

They ate their breakfast in stony silence. At some point, Bucky began picking at his plate.

“Don’t like it?” Steve asked tersely.

Bucky glanced up, looking like he’d just been caught elbow-deep in the cookie jar. “No! No, it’s good.” He pushed a bit of egg and cheese with his fork. “It’s just…”

“Just?”

Bucky shrugged. “It’s just savory?” He winced.

Steve dropped his fork on the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, yeah. I was expecting _someone else_. Someone who doesn’t have a sweet tooth and has been around a lot in the last few days,” Steve said, waspish.

Bucky looked caught out and uncomfortable. “I…” His eyes shifted around the room, and suddenly Steve realised that he looked terrified.

“Bucky?”

Bucky dropped his fork, too, and stood up, tense and trembling. “Steve. I. I.” He closed his eyes.

“Oh my god, don’t you dare.” Steve stepped around the counter and threw himself at Bucky, grabbing his arms and holding on for dear life. “Don’t you dare hide again.”

“Steve, I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry. I’m—”

“Shh. Just shut up for one fucking second, you asshole. Just.” Steve held him even tighter, remembering to check his strength at the last second. “Just hold me and shut your damn mouth, all right?”

“Okay,” Bucky squeaked out, body and voice trembling like a leaf.

The next few seconds were perfect, if you asked Steve. They both needed a hug. Not just any hug, they had needed an “each other hug.” The hug where Steve could bury his nose in Bucky’s neck and burrow into his scent and get the small hairs behind Bucky’s ear to tickle his forehead. That kind of hug. And Bucky would always have his own nose in Steve’s wispy cowlicks and one hand between his shoulder blades, right on his cybernetic spine, and another at the back of his head and…

“Steve, what the fuck.” Steve felt Bucky grope around his implant, or whatever you called cybernetics that had fused with your body because of illegal science. “Steve?”

Oh shit, no. Not this. Not now.

“Okay, so, remember the whole thing Loki explained about us having been… inoculated with—”

“What the fuck happened?” Bucky suddenly held him at arm’s length while sending Steve some major frowny-face vibes. Which was a bit rich coming from someone who had also been experimented on.

“Okay, so one of the side effects seems to be that we fused with our cybernetics? Like all our implants?”

“… Right.”

“Cool, can we go back to hugging?” Steve seriously didn’t want to talk about his spine. Or any of his implants. He didn’t want to talk about them, see them, think about them. Just no.

“No, wait, no, Steve.” And then they had a small hand battle that looked fucking ridiculous, but Steve wanted to go back to ten seconds ago when Bucky hadn’t been motherhenning him. “Steve! Have you seen a doctor?”

“No?” And at that, Steve boggled. “Why?”

Bucky threw his arms in the air, eyes going wide, then threw his hands towards Steve like he was demonstrating some kind of understandable point. Which he wasn’t.

“What? What!”

“You have been inoculated with an experimental metamaterial! You nearly died! You have—” Bucky made wavy gestures at his own head, which was explicit in exactly zero ways, oh my god. “—weird technological powers! You _fused_ with your own implants!”

“Well, do you know a guy with a PhD in Weird Shit hanging around nearby to look me over?” Bucky let out an inarticulate sound. “Yeah, didn’t think so,” Steve snarked.

Bucky pinched the bridge of his nose like he was suffering, and Steve felt a sudden bubble of happiness at seeing this familiar gesture of exasperation. “Listen, Steve, I love you but you really have t—”

Steve’s brain screeched to a halt. “You do?”

Bucky gaped at Steve.

Steve gaped at Bucky.

Then Bucky squeaked — again! Was this a new Bucky sound? — and put his hands in front of him. “Fuck.”

“Buck.”

“No.” Bucky closed his eyes.

And when he reopened them Steve knew this wasn’t Bucky, this was Sergei.

“AAAAAAHHHHH BUCKY!!” Steve yelled.

Sergei sighed. “What did he do now?” He frowned. “Wait, did he—“

Steve didn’t answer, he just pointed to the ridiculously small couch. “You are going to sit here and suffer through a hug.”

Sergei put his hands on his hips. “I’m what now?”

“Sofa. Hug. Chop chop.”

Sergei complied with minimal grumbling. His hugs were a piss-poor replacement for Bucky’s soft embraces.

But they were a replacement, nonetheless.

* * *

Bucky made another appearance when Claire Temple arrived. However, he managed to execute the cowardliest dance move ever observed by humankind and hid behind the good doctor until Steve capitulated and retreated to his own room to wait for his turn with Temple. No couple’s therapy today, as Sergei and Steve had taken to calling the sessions where both of them were interviewed by Claire. Nor would he get one of those rare sneak peeks into Bucky’s mental health.

Since they had been registered as needing next-of-kin therapy, sometimes they had sessions together.

Steve had taken to treasuring those moments because, sometimes, they were the only minutes in the day he would get with his friend. Partner. Roommate. Whatever the fuck.

And now he was in his own personal version of a timeout corner, a hair’s breadth away from blowing a gasket. He had been aggressively poring over some files that Dugan had left for them so they could send him some insight for the raid Violent Crimes were preparing for tomorrow on Lukin’s official flat and sundry illegally-obtained properties. He hated logs and registries with the power of a thousand suns, but he was so frustrated by Bucky’s antics that his bitterness was making him hyperfocus on this cross-referencing bullshit like there was no tomorrow.

Steve was tracing lines on his personal copy of the colony’s land registry, circling all of Lukin’s suspected hideouts in red, taking the time to make them a bit squiggly and writing “asshole” around all the circles because it appeased his soul, okay?

There was a knock at his door.

“If this is Bucky, you can fuck right off.”

Sergei let out an ugly snort as he opened the door. “Right. Your turn, pal.”

“So I guess he ran away, _again_?” Sergei simply shrugged at that, and Steve blew a raspberry, deflating like an old balloon. “I just don’t get it.”

Sergei shrugged again, dispassionate and a bit uninterested. “Can’t help you. I only feel a vague sense of overwhelming panic all the damn time.”

“But what does he have to fear, damnit?”

Again, Sergei shrugged, because while he might think he was an Earther, a lot of his mannerisms were very Spacer, the first of them being that ubiquitous gallic shrug.

Steve clicked his tongue and shouldered past Sergei towards the living-dining-kitchen area where Claire was waiting, the image of patience and calm. He plopped down on the sofa, which only served to really emphasize to his therapist how petulant he felt. _Good job, Steve._

“Hello, Steve.”

“Hi, Claire.”

She smiled. “Right. Well, I think that today we are going to make this short.” Steve tilted his head, interest spiked. He was all for short sessions, yes, please and thank you. “And for once, I’m going to set the subject of today’s session. Bucky told me you had an argument this morning?”

Steve groaned and threw his head back on the sofa, a full-body demonstration of how exasperated he felt.

“I see,” she said keenly.

Steve rolled his head from side to side to really drive the point home, both for Claire’s benefit and his own. Then he stopped because he actually had to engage in the whole therapy thing. “He’s just never there, and then he fucking runs away all the damn time! He’s, he’s afraid of something and won’t tell me, and what the hell can I do when he’s just retreating behind Sergei like he’s his big brother slash bouncer to— ugh!” Steve rubbed his forehead, and then, feeling like his disgust hadn’t been conveyed well enough, he threw his hands in the air. “ **UGH**!” he exclaimed, capitalised and in bold because no lowercase could carry the full weight of his annoyance.

“Okay, Steve, please close your eyes and just breathe for a moment, until you… do not feel the urge to wiggle everywhere.” Steve did so, for a full minute under Claire’s guidance. “Okay, now open your eyes. How’s the fidgeting?”

“Six.” Claire stared at him expectantly. “Okay, seven.” She grinned and gave him a fidget toy, and oh wow, it was one of the clickety ones, too!

“Why would Bucky be afraid?” she asked in her calm voice. Claire really was good at her job.

Steve clicked the toy pensively. The flat was quiet, apart from the very faint scurrying buzz of the tablet he had turned on in his bedroom. “I just.” He didn’t want to entertain the thought, but Steve wasn’t a detective for nothing, alright? He knew. He’d guessed. “I think he’s afraid of me.” Then a thought suddenly occurred to him and his hand flew to his spine, to the point where his skin hardened like scales or chitin and became metal interlocking vertebras. “He’s afraid of what I’ve become,” he whispered, eyes lost in the space between him and Claire.

“Now, Steve, let’s not jump to conclusions.” He blinked at her. “Has he ever been afraid or disgusted in any way by the fact that you had implants?”

“No? But. But this is bigger? I mean I’m not even sure I’m still technically human?”

She made the face that Steve had begun to associate with a very specific “Baby Jesus have mercy on these dumbasses” mood, which Steve had witnessed several times in Claire when she gave them a joint session. And he had prior knowledge of that specific face because Sam often wore it when Steve did something dumb.

“Okay, let’s not address this ontological crisis today, and I’ll pencil that in for tomorrow?” He nodded vehemently. “Good. Now. Bucky.”

“Yes. Bucky.”

She looked expectantly at Steve, who got stuck on clicking his fidget toy for a long moment.

“Bucky wouldn’t be afraid of me,” he said decisively, and when she nodded encouragingly, he went on, “because he never cared for implants but has always been accepting of them for everybody, and me. Okay.”

“What is Bucky afraid of, Steve?”

“Uh. Hull breaches. Hmmmm… I guess, like me, he might be a bit traumatised by deep space now, right? Haha.” That was an Awkward Laughter award winner, right there. Her look was still expectant, so, the answer wasn’t space, okay. He thought some more, clicking and flicking at the toy in his hand rapidly. “He hates his routine getting interrupted.” But that was a dislike. Then Steve remembered how Bucky had mourned his parents for such a long time and had flipped his lid when Becca had said she wanted to go work on a mining asteroid that one time. “Losing family?”

Claire nodded.

“Okay but…” _Oh._ “Oh.” Claire looked at him with her kind eyes, and he needed to verbalise this, right? “He’s afraid of losing me?”

And had very nearly lost him, too. Had actually thought he’d lost Steve. Wow, what a fine sleuth he made. Detective of the year, right here.

“But I’m right here! I mean, I must have done _something_!” He felt increasingly agitated. “But I just don’t… we were fine, we were getting interrogated by Phillips, and then we went over to Becca’s and ta-da, no Bucky.”

“Okay, so what could have happened?”

“Claire, I’m bad at this, you know I’m no good at guessing what goes through people’s minds.”

She nodded but still didn’t relent. “Yes, but this is Bucky, right?”

“… Yeah. Yeah, okay, it’s Bucky.” Steve combed his fingers through his hair, his left hand still clicking mindlessly at the toy. He scratched his metal spine. “He only froze when he saw Becca.”

“Mm hmm, go ahead, play as if you were someone reuniting with a sibling after a very long time.”

Steve rolled his eyes, but played along. “Like, I’m walking over, I’m gonna see my sister, I hope she doesn’t mind.” Claire nodded. “I wonder how she is. I wonder if we haven’t changed too… much.” Her stare was so goddamn knowing. “I hope she still recognises me. I hope she still likes me. Or.” Steve dropped the toy beside him on the sofa and hid his face in his hands. “Oh my god, does he think we’re going to… what? Think he’s changed too much? Prefer the old version?” Steve let his hands fall and snarled, “How can he think that about himself but not think the same thing about _me_?”

Claire only smiled and pushed over some of the pastries she’d brought forward. “This is a sentiment called shame, and a lot of people feel it, often for illogical reasons.”

Steve groaned, “That’s ridiculous, Claire, he did what he thought was right at the time. There’s no shame in sacrificing himself to find out what that motherfucker had in store for—”

She stalled him, “Steve. Do not invalidate Bucky’s feelings. Do not fight his shame. Address it, accept it, help him forgive himself.”

Steve shut up and blushed. He blushed because it was his turn to feel ashamed of himself. What Claire was saying was that Bucky was hurting. He was there, somewhere under the Russian wintry layers of Sergei, thinking that he was better alone in the cold than in this flat with Steve.

“Okay. I’ll… I’m gonna do my best. I’m gonna bring him back.”

Claire smiled encouragingly. Of course, his newfound understanding of the situation didn’t let him off the hook for the last few minutes of his time with Claire, and he had to get his breathing under control and his emotions reigned in. Which was a hard task, considering.

When he was finished, he escorted Claire to the door. As she was putting on her jacket, she dropped a bomb right at Steve’s feet. “You shouldn’t worry too much about Sergei staying, Steve.” He tilted his head, puzzled by the non-sequitur. “Such a construct will always end up merging with its host. You just need to be patient with both of them.”

Steve was left too dumbfounded to react, and Claire had slipped through the door before he could think of anything to say.

Well.

Damn.

He deflated and exhaled exhaustedly, leaning his forehead against the door, overcome by lassitude. He turned around, still leaning on the door, and surveyed the flat, looking at all the similarities and differences between the space that he and Bucky had carved out years ago and this new space, full to the brim with their old stuff, testimonies to past lives, and with new objects mixed in. Since Steve didn’t need them anymore, Sergei had dismantled all his old implant maintenance gadgets, fascinated by them in a way that was very similar to Bucky. There was a collection of photographs from Russia spread out on the side table and others pinned to the wall next to the living room window. Sergei said it made him think of home.

Sergei hadn’t looked his identity up, afraid of what he would find.

Steve had, though.

There were three pairs of shoes, two in disarray, for Steve and Sergei, and one neatly lined up against the wall, for Bucky, because Sergei wore his rope-soled slippers everywhere, and the few times Bucky had made an appearance he had stared at them in astounded outrage.

Steve pushed all the shoes closer to the wall so they wouldn’t be in the way and walked down to the room farthest from the entryway, at the far end of their little flat. He wasn’t really sure what to do, just walked, and then knocked on the door, thoughts absent and head full of the colony’s song.

“Yes?”

The door was ajar; Steve opened it a little wider. “Hey.”

“Hey.” A jaw clench, so this was Sergei, maybe. Steve wished Sergei would stop doing that, because he wasn’t sure he needed the reminder of how soft and beautiful that jaw was. “Stevie?”

Oh. “Buck?”

Whoever was currently reclining on the headboard gave a nervous shrug with only one shoulder. “Sort of?”

Steve was all out of fucks to give. “Am I going to need to tiptoe around you, in case you retreat behind big brother Sergei again?”

Bucky looked to the side and shrugged again, his jaw clenching in the way that only Sergei had, but his demeanour was so subdued, it could only be him. He scooted a bit to the side and dropped his tablet onto his minuscule bedside table. “We’re both in here.” Constructs, identities, alters, merging — Steve felt his heart in his throat — Sergei wasn’t a construct, not really.

The invitation was clear, but the unobtrusive manner with which Bucky was hunching over himself made Steve… reluctant to move. What if he scared his already skittish friend? What if this wasn’t what Bucky wanted? What if it made the very touch-averse Sergei uncomfortable?

After much internal dithering, Steve plopped down onto the bed and sat back against the headboard, shoulder to shoulder with Bucky, so close he could feel the heat from his skin under his soft linen shirt, a line of soft fire licking along his arm.

“Claire told me you were…” Steve licked his lips and felt Bucky tense beside him, but he barrelled on. “She told me you and Sergei were… merging?”

Bucky picked at a loose thread at the bottom of his shirt, but did not answer immediately. After a moment, he said, “I’m not fake.” Oh, and this was definitely Sergei now. “I don’t want to die.”

Steve twisted on the bed and gripped Sergei’s forearm, leaning towards him. Bucky and Sergei cycling couldn’t end well if Steve didn’t step in to help. “Hey, hey, you’re okay.”

Sergei shook his head and grabbed Steve’s shoulder with the hand he had free, putting them in even closer proximity. “Steve, I’m just going to disappear, I don’t exist.”

“Hey, no, stop it, Sergei, okay? You exist. You’ll just become another facet of Bucky, you’ll still be in there.”

“It’s not just me Steve. If I die, who will think of Yelena? Who will know?”

Steve didn’t have the heart to tell him that Dugan had searched all over Earth and Space. Yelena Smerdyakova existed. Had existed, fifty years ago. Sergei Andreyevich Smerdyakov had lived, and here in Bucky’s head was the echo of a man whose personality, whose memories, had been replicated on a darkbox, ages ago. The implant had been traced, it was an old model that had been banned.

A construct. An echo.

“Bucky will remember her for you, okay? I’ll remember everything you tell me, I’ll keep her and you.”

“Bucky and you? You swear?” His voice was so small and scared, and even with those nasal consonants, he sounded like a child afraid of the dark.

“Yeah. I’m here. I’m never leaving either of you.” Steve gently touched his fingers to Sergei’s cheek, hoping a soft touch would bring him comfort without overwhelming him. Sergei closed his eyes and leaned ever so slightly into the touch. Steve watched as he clenched his jaw, and then as the muscle relaxed, softening the line of his jaw, changing the shape of his face.

“Bucky?”

“Stevie?”

Bucky. “Buck.” Christ. He needed a fucking hug; this promise to Sergei had made his throat close up with emotion.

Then he realised. Shit. Bucky was so very, very fucking close.

He was _right_ **there**.

“You…”

Oh my god, he had to say it. Fuck it.

Steve slung his leg over Bucky’s own and straddled him. “I’m not leaving you either, Buck. I would never hate you, here, or in any universe there is,” Steve declared, his hands firmly on Bucky’s arms.

Bucky looked so lost and so confused.

“There’s no part of you that I can’t love.”

The change in Bucky’s expression was instantaneous, and he slowly reached for Steve’s cheek, touching him with the very tips of his fingers, gone from afraid to reverent in the space of one single declaration.

“Steve.”

Steve reached for Bucky’s hand and guided it from his cheek to his mouth, touching Bucky’s fingertips to his lips and then guiding it to Bucky’s mouth, oh-so-gently repeating the gesture, Bucky’s fingertips to Bucky’s lips.

Suddenly, the scant space left between them was both so very small and much too large. Bucky slid his hand behind Steve’s head, his fingers skipping over the extremity of his metal spine, pulling him infinitesimally close. Steve brought both of his hands to Bucky’s neck, thumbing delicately at his jaw and feeling the fine, residual scar from Bucky’s operation on the back of his neck. Sergei’s emotional upheaval made him crave Bucky’s closeness. Crave Bucky.

“I went to the Moon and back for you.” Steve brushed his lips tentatively against Bucky’s, feeling his sharp intake of breath. “I died, and came back. For you.” They both closed their eyes, Steve caressing Bucky’s cheeks with his thumbs, Bucky’s fingers slipping tenderly from his cybernetic vertebrae into his hair. “I’m not letting you go.”

The kiss started off sweet and slow, a touch of lips and an exhaled breath, in sync and suspended in forever. Then maybe was it Bucky, murmuring something that only he could hear, moving his lips slightly, or maybe was it Steve, barely licking his lips, a touch of moisture… Bucky whined low and finally crushed his lips to Steve’s, who rode the thrill of having Bucky right there. He rose slightly on his knees, a leverage he used to lean over Bucky and kiss him more thoroughly, lips moving, touching, opening in wordless sentences left unsaid.

Bucky, his head tilted up, brought his hands down to Steve’s hips as Steve opened his mouth to lick at Bucky’s lips, and then only touch the tip of his tongue to Bucky’s, then retreating, teasing him tantalisingly, showing their closeness by straying just that millimetre out of reach.

“Steve.” Bucky’s voice trembled, weak, demanding.

“Shhh.” Steve put his thumb to Bucky’s lips, pushing slightly, testing their softness in fascination. “It’s okay.”

Bucky closed his eyes again, and when he opened them, Steve was transfixed for several seconds, adrift in the minute shards of grey and blue that made up his irises. He gazed into Bucky’s eyes in a way he never could before, and they were so, so close that he could discern the translucent reflection of light coming from the window, sky and clouds and axis.

“It’s okay,” Steve whispered against Bucky’s lips again.

Bucky kissed him, and Steve thought that feeling might be most devastating in existence, more encompassing than hearing the mainframe sing for the first time, more mind-blowing than standing in the ducts, more dangerous than floating in freefall, as infinite as space. This was just a kiss, joining their lips, but they had overcome so many hardships to finally get here that Steve couldn’t _not_ be shattered right now.

And neither could Bucky. Steve heard a muffled sob and felt Bucky’s lips tremble against his. So he stopped and gathered Bucky against him, pulling Bucky’s head against his collarbone. “Hey, hey. I’m here.”

“I don’t know who I am,” he sniffed, gripping Steve’s wool sweater like a lifeline. “I’m lost without you.” He sniffed again, and Steve felt him bury his nose against his chest, as if he could burrow in there and hide. “What if that was Sergei you kissed? What if it’s Bucky? What if it’s both?”

Steve sat back and took Bucky’s face in his hands, forcibly removing him from his hiding place against his jumper. “I actually like Sergei, okay? I love you, Bucky, but Sergei is an okay guy too. I’m not going to love you any less because the both of you end up coalescing into a new person.” Bucky — or maybe Sergei, who knew? — searched Steve’s face, one small tear tracking down his cheek. Steve wiped it with his thumb and smiled. “We can’t have lived through what has happened to us and not come out changed. But whatever version of you I get, I’ll hold him right here in my heart.”

“Steve.” Bucky nodded against his hands, and tried for a very feeble smile of his own. “All the pieces of me. All of them are yours. Whichever shape I piece them together in.”

Steve beamed, happy, and Bucky stared at him in wonder.

“You’re like sunshine,” he murmured before hugging Steve tight.

Steve didn’t try to guess at his accent, at who it was, who said what, who was hugging him. It didn’t matter.

And when he felt Bucky’s tablet catching some signal, Steve suppressed the ping.

They had some hugging to catch up on.

And he didn’t want to let the real world in just yet.


	12. Welding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein loose ends get tied and Steve and Bucky (and you reader who suffered through cliffhangers and plot heavy angst) get some well earned... smut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is quite gigantic (just under 14k words), and that deserves its own warning I think. But then again, of those 14k, 6k are softcore angst, fluffy uwu and lowkey body-worship porn... :D

### Part III, Chapter 12: Welding

Welding is a fabrication process that joins materials, usually metals or thermoplastics, by using high heat to melt the parts together and allowing them to cool, causing fusion. Welding is distinct from lower temperature metal-joining techniques such as brazing and soldering, which do not melt the base metal.

In addition to melting the base metal, a filler material is typically added to the joint to form a pool of molten material (the weld pool) that cools to form a joint that, based on weld configuration (butt, full penetration, fillet, etc.), can be stronger than the base material (parent metal). Pressure may also be used in conjunction with heat or by itself to produce a weld. Welding also requires a form of shield to protect the filler metals or melted metals from being contaminated or oxidized.

`— Wikipedia, “Welding”`

**SED 2587 of Moon Base foundation, May second, 2076**

Dear Journal, what the fuck.

There’s a limit to what our Lost and Found service can find, you know? I’m sure you know. But my colleagues apparently _don’t_.

Okay, look, yes, we did extend our scope to finding papers, finding culprits, finding… anything that needs finding, really. But, this, this I’m forking over to Medical. Like, dude (or in this case, it’s a dudette), you don’t have anything that needs to be found here, you need medical attention.

It’s Rowena (again). She asked me to find her _**period**_ , for fuck’s sake. I’ve found a lot of lost stuff over the last four years building the first biodome, here, but this one? This one’s a first. Anyhow, it wasn’t too hard to tell her she really had to go see a physician.

**SED 2587 of Moon Base foundation, May third, 2076**

Dear Journal,

Okay, I’m still stuck on this, though. How did they manage to have sex? Sex on the Moon is so uncomfortable? I’ve tried it— I mean, I think everyone’s tried (not Kurt, he’s asexual, so…), there’s this mystique of shagging on the Moon, you know?

Well, the mystique doesn’t measure up for shit. It’s uncomfortable as hell. Since the gravity is about an eighth of Earth’s, you’re basically bouncing on each other, but not in the fun way. I guess you haven’t lived until you get ejected to the other side of the room by a well-placed hip thrust from your partner. So unless you pack yourselves in a bedroll and rope yourselves together…

Wait. Did they shag in the single-bedroll dormitories? Those are communal. Ew, Rowena, ew!

`— Journal of Hasegawa Hiroki, Lost and Found operator and Founding member of the Space Investigation Unit`

They fell into a routine, spurred on by Claire. She told them both — told them all, really, since Bucky and Sergei swung back and forth a lot, now — to try and get back into everyday habits and introduce change slowly. Bucky came out more and more these days, only reverting back to Sergei when stuff got to be too much. After Steve had kissed and held him for an hour, Bucky had been so very, very tired from the overload of feelings that he had just relented. Handed the reins over to Sergei. Claire had told him that he needed to progressively stop treading water and begin swimming anew, and she had worked with them to set up subtle but definite signs that Steve could pick up on to know who he was dealing with.

Hence, the morning kiss situation.

Bucky couldn’t deal with a lot of emotional upheaval, and Sergei was still very cautious about not infringing on Steve and Bucky’s “star-crossed lovers schtick,” as he had described it to Claire. So every morning as Steve was cooking breakfast, reclaiming the habit he’d always had, if Sergei was up, he would set the table, and if Bucky was up, he would come and kiss Steve on the cheek.

Sergei found it sweet, Bucky found it absolutely earth-shattering every damn time. Earth-shattering was to be avoided, of course, so he both yearned and dreaded those kisses. His mind was a weird place right now.

Still. Kissing. That was good news.

The bad news was that since it was their only way of conveying their affection to one another, every instance of physical closeness set off proximity alarms in Bucky’s brain. Alarm bells that sounded very much like, “Oh my god, he’s very close, what do I do, is this his arm, there’s skin under that shirt so I’m one degree of separation from nakedness.” This made his thoughts go haywire, and it was frankly getting ridiculous.

Thus, when Sergei woke up one morning and felt the amorphous yearning sloshing in his brain, he decided he just wasn’t here for this and turned over to leave Bucky to deal with the day. There was only so much dumbassery he was disposed to suffer through.

So Bucky had to get up and fretfully make his way into the kitchen, hearing the banging of pots and pans and a curse from Steve. Steve seemed to have pinched a finger, because he was shaking his hand as if that would cure the pain, while checking the pan’s temperature by hovering his hand no more than a centimetre above the surface.

One day he was going to burn himself, the little asshole, and Bucky was going to gloat and lord it over him while also lovingly bandaging his hand, because he was a sucker like that.

“Hey.”

Steve startled, surprisingly not burning himself, and then smiled at Bucky. “Hey!” He made an abortive gesture to, maybe cut some more butter? Who knew. This however, brought his hand in Bucky’s line of sight and…

“Godamnit, Steve.” That dumbass ray of sunshine had cut himself.

In one very practiced move, Bucky was beside Steve, a clean rag in hand, and taking his elbow to drag him to the sink. However, Steve, for once, let himself be led there, which was such a surprise that Bucky relented and glanced down.

“What’s going — Oh, wow.” The gash already looked partly closed and, wow…

“Yeah… not sure we’re gonna need that rag, huh?” Steve said, sheepish and uncertain. Bucky watched as the small wound, now not much more than a scrape, really, closed up by itself, covered in a strange greyish powder, the skin moving on its own, uncanny ripples shuddering underneath it.

“That’s…” Bucky paused, but when Steve made a doubtful noise, he continued, still just as fascinated and astonished, and not that repulsed, either. “That’s pretty incredible.”

Steve snorted and pulled his hand away with a jerk. “More or less incredible than being asked to join a search because I can hear tech?” This sounded like a subject change. There was a defensive note in Steve’s voice and he seemed uncomfortable about something, but Bucky decided to let it slide.

Bucky laughed, because yes, hearing tech was actually a bit insane, a bit strange, a bit uncanny. Everything pertaining to wipeout was. Steve looked at him expectantly, and after checking in with himself, Bucky felt like he was enough to himself right now to not feel weird kissing Steve.

Steve’s cheek felt raspy with blonde stubble and Bucky smiled, inhaling the soft scent of Steve’s shampoo. “Good morning,” he murmured.

Steve threw his arms around Bucky’s neck and kissed him soundly on the lips before wiggling away and sauntering back to his pan, looking giddy and excited.

After their talk the other day, they had both spoken at length with Dr. Temple about guilt and loss, and also the fact that Bucky’s self-sacrificing and self-destructive behaviour and his inability to cope with separation was maybe a sign of codependency.

That had led to several long nights of staring at the ceiling with Sergei embodying the very concept of, “Well, duh!” Bucky could only roll himself into a ball of misery, because being judged by someone occupying the same headspace wasn’t a very pleasant experience, and being told that he also had to learn to deal with separation wasn’t either. Steve had actually been extremely colourful in his expletives.

Bucky set the table as Steve finished flipping the crêpes, leaving some batter for the next day in the fridge.

Adding to the uncanny feeling was how similar to the Before their mornings had become. Steve made breakfast. Sergei or Bucky set the table and put the utensils in the dishwasher. Steve read the news. Bucky checked their plan for the day. He’d taken to setting specific slots of time for Sergei and for himself. He made time to read again and to cook complicated dinners. There always was at least half an hour for Sergei to type his memories, sometimes write them down on honest-to-god paper. This slot would coincide with Steve’s time for drawing. At first, Steve had spent those time slots with Sergei, telling him everything about the person he had been. The family he had had. The life he had lived. They never talked about his death or how he would eventually fade. It took them three days to go through that, and now Sergei…

Committed himself to memory.

Committed his self to history.

Now it was Sergei sometimes seeking out Steve during his drawing time so that he would draw a memory. A landscape. A person. Yelena, mostly.

He’d stopped when his descriptions of Yelena echoed Becca’s traits more and more.

When Bucky had asked Dr. Temple about how this was supposed to help them get back into normal life, she’d said that before learning to live in a society, they had to re-learn how to live with themselves.

The sun was being reflected brightly into the colony on the sunny morning of August tenth and Steve was scrolling through headlines, drinking his OJ. The déjà-vu that hit Bucky at that moment was so strong it felt uncomfortable. “Wow, looks like the military shit is hitting the fan before the Lukin crap,” Steve said while eating, pushing his mouthful of food into his cheek like a hamster. “Most of these articles are dissecting Earth meddling… and speculating about independence? Shit…”

Bucky moved the green (Bucky), blue (Steve), and grey (Sergei) slots around on his agenda, trying to fit them around therapy and also this meeting with Phillips that they were supposed to be at in an hour. “Any news concerning cyborgs?” They were trying to keep their ears to the hull; what if Lukin had cooked up a plan B for casting scorn on all cyborgs, modded and transhumans? Then all the pain they’d been through would have been for nothing.

“Mmhmm, just a short item about several people — all modded — being released after the Oversight Board of fucking Habitat reviewed their cases and found some tampered evidence. Short but scathing.” Steve swallowed his mouthful and looked judgmentally at the tablet. “As it should be. Lost and Found fucked up so much that we had to get reviewed by another Admin. That’s embarrassing.”

Bucky hummed, used to having Steve read the headlines and do article critique and political analysis all in the same go.

“Is it okay if I let you do your art after seeing Dr. Temple?”

“That’s okay.” Steve crammed the last of his crêpe in his mouth and looked like he was going to continue, but a judgy look from Bucky made him swallow before he resumed speaking. “Hehe, oops. Uh, yeah, go ahead. I’m always drained after those sessions, anyway.”

Bucky hummed and moved the Sergei slot to right after the therapy slot.

“Bucky. Can I have another kiss before we go?”

Bucky checked in. Because now, he always checked in. This could be the biggest change they had in their relationship. Bucky just couldn’t fathom being impulsive anymore. Because what if he kissed Steve and Steve ended up kissing Sergei, instead? What if he forgot what was happening because he retreated? What if Steve said or did something and he wasn’t there? What if Sergei was present right now, and was forcing himself for Bucky’s sake?

It felt impossible to extricate himself from this whole conundrum. He had slipped once, two days ago, losing a bit of time during one long hug and a series of kisses with Steve, and that had sent him into a major crisis. Sergei had rolled with it in spite of his discomfort, and Steve had noticed nothing until Sergei had tensed up, and then it had been a whole new clusterfuck.

Steve had apologised to Sergei, Sergei said he wasn’t that bothered, Steve said it was still a big deal, especially with him being touch averse, and Sergei had been weird and had left Bucky to deal with Steve having a meltdown. They had hugged, and Steve had been very fucking tense.

And then Steve had said that he felt guilty about kissing someone who didn’t want it, but that he didn’t actually _not_ want to kiss Sergei, just a lot less than Bucky and wow, new can of worms? Who would have thought?

It had been two very tense days.

Steve looked… beseechingly would be a strong word, but this was as close as Steve ever got to actual beseeching. Bucky could feel Sergei at the surface of his mind, but neither Bucky nor Sergei could really refuse Steve anything.

Bucky stood up and didn’t try to decipher the meaning behind Steve’s astonished look. He simply gathered Steve into his arms and gave him a peck on the lips. And then a peck on his crooked nose, which scrunched under his lips, so he smiled and went to kiss Steve on his cheek, right under his left eye, making him giggle and push Bucky away.

“Okay, goofy, get ready. We shouldn’t be late or Phillips will make us file all the reports by hand and colour code them or something equally atrocious.”

None of the three of them said a word about Sergei being there, lurking at the edges of Bucky’s consciousness. Sergei clenched his jaw repeatedly as they walked over to the tram, and on the way, he slipped into speech patterns that Bucky never had. Steve sometimes seemed on the verge of saying something, but then Sergei would just stare out the tram window, which made Bucky stew in silence. It was all weird, and really… that was to be expected.

The Bullpen hadn’t changed much. Or not at all. Investigating anything from theft to high criminality was a necessity that couldn’t be put on hold just because they had both been otherwise occupied. It had existed from the first day a bored guy in the first Moon colony had organised the Lost and Found, and back then, it had been all about finding lost multimeters. Now, it was all about finding where the fundings for mirror repairs had disappeared to. Finding whose pockets the money had been funnelled into.

They entered the lobby, spacious, white and overrun by potted plants. The expression on Steve’s face looked like he was coming home, and Bucky couldn’t help but feel an instinctive sense of belonging, now tinged with bittersweetness. The motto written in large Garamond letters on the white walls — Find What Is Lost, Seek What Is Hidden — still rang true to his ears. But—

“Bucky? _Steve_!?” They both whirled towards the entrance desk and Darcy, who was standing there, jaw hanging open and looking at them like they — _oh_. “Oh my god, come here, both of you!” She looked like she had just seen a literal ghost. Damn, the secret of their survival must have been classified to the team assigned with their case, judging from the look she was giving them.

She didn’t wait for them to come over and bounded towards them, herself. The next few minutes would have been excruciatingly awkward if it hadn’t been Darcy. She didn’t really try for physical contact, but showered them with bubbly smiles and simple words of happiness at seeing them back. “I’m just gonna say, Steve, I missed you dishing out with me, and Buck? Seriously, I couldn’t believe Schmidt when he said you were evading your psych eval!”

Ah, so those had been the rumours. The question had been stewing at the back of his mind for some days. If Lukin had never expected Bucky to survive unscathed, and wanted him to seem like he’d gone rogue, he must have spread some rumours, right?

Well, there it was.

“Nah, still here, in one piece, more or less.”

Darcy looked like she was on the verge of saying something, but hesitated at the last minute and finally just grinned and waved them over to her desk. “Here, have some of these.” She shoved a box of mandazis under their noses. “Someone named uh…” Darcy checked her notebook. “Zenzele Shuri ka Tchaka brought them here saying the bill was now an op plus a box of mandazi. When she told me the bill had to be settled by Steve Rogers, I told her you were dead.” She made a face. Actually, they all made a face, but Darcy rallied back with a smile. “Anyway, and so I told her, sorry ma’am, you know, and all that jazz, and she went all cheeky and mysterious like, ‘I don’t bring mandazis with no expectation of some type of dessert in return,’ and then she left me with this box and Dugan was like, ‘Oh Darcy, this could be poisoned!,’ and I was like—” Oh my god, Bucky might just have missed her blabber, and it seemed that Steve had, too. “Duuuude, like Duuugan, listen, she wouldn’t poison us, there are like fifty thousand cameras in here, and we had a conversation, but I ate a mandazi and he came back to check on me every half an hour and now there’s only like half of the mandazis left, so I think you can have them on account of you not being dead and not being auto-fired, you know?”

She then shoved the box into Bucky’s arms, in a move not dissimilar to a preemptive strike. She didn’t tear up, nor did she look sad or glad, she simply stared them down aggressively after the box transfer, and when the silence began to feel uncomfortable, she scathingly declared, “You better never do that shit again, or I’ll go piss on both your memorial trees every day for a year.”

Yeah, nobody wanted their death commemorated in that particular way, so Bucky grinned, trying to alleviate the mood. “Don’t worry, with these in my stomach, I won’t be able to move too far away, anyway.” She giggled. “Can you send word to Phillips that we arrived? We’re going up, I suppose we’re expected, but I wouldn’t want to surprise him, you know.”

She snorted disgracefully. “Oh honey, I _know_ , right? That old coot.” She walked around her desk and sat down. “Come on, shoo, don’t leave grandma Chester waiting.”

They waved her goodbye and went to the elevators. Bucky opened the box of mandazi during the ride and offered one to Steve.

“I mished her,” Steve said around half a mandazi.

Bucky hummed. “Yeah. Me too. Also don’t speak with your mouth full, Steve, for the love of shit—”

The elevator doors opened, cutting Bucky off at the end of his sentence. The usually pretty noiseless corridor, seldom crowded and seeing most of its traffic at lunch hour, was now packed and buzzing with the unhappy hubbub of conversation; picture frames, plants, and knick-knacks were all heaped into boxes in the arms of grumbling officers milling about and waiting for the next elevator down. Steve and Bucky’s elevator was immediately assailed by a group of three officers, most of whom Bucky knew. All of whom were Vice.

Bucky paled and shuddered.

* * *

The two-storey ride to Phillips’ floor was…

Chilly.

Cold as… something real cold. Sergei leaned down to whisper in Steve’s ear. “What’s something real cold?”

Steve shrugged, seemingly unperturbed by the icy stares some of the officers were sending them. “I don’t know, Phillips’ tits?”

Sergei snorted, which amplified tenfold the power of the glares of which they were on the receiving end. Bucky had been so stable over the last few days, dealing pretty well with having Sergei’s consciousness close to his, that Sergei was a bit bummed on his behalf to see those strides forward being set back because of a trio of assholes.

He had no earthly idea what their names were. Douchebags from the unit Bucky had transferred to, he guessed. Bucky was silent, cowering and panicky in the back of his mind. Bob One was looking him squarely in the eyes, features contorted in a rictus made uneven by burn scars. Bobs Two and Three were busy sneering like this was the Olympics of scorn, and yet Steve stayed cool as a cucumber, munching on his third mandazi — the world was past the need to condemn gluttony as a sin, anyway.

“You need to sneeze, man?” Sergei pointed at Bob One with his chin.

The elevator dinged.

Bob One spat on Sergei.

Wow.

“You ass—”

Steve gripped his arm with a strength Sergei wasn’t sure he had real control over. “You should save your spit for your next job interview, Schmidt. Come on, Bucks.”

Steve dragged Sergei out the elevator. Nevertheless, he didn’t even try to resist the impulse to give Bobs One, Two and Three the finger, mouthing “Suck it” as the doors closed on their irate faces.

“сукаблядь,” Sergei grunted, looking down at his sweater. “Ugh, Steve, I’ve got douchebag spit on my shirt, now.”

Steve giggled and stopped dragging Sergei down the grey corridor — funny how the memory of his time in the Russian Federation Army and then in the Russian government had merged with Bucky’s knowledge of this building. He expected door handles to look a certain way, walls to be beige and not grey. Everything felt familiar, and a bit off.

“That’s pretty disgusting, Bucky.” He searched his pockets for a handkerchief and frowned as he wiped Sergei’s shirt down. “Wait, is it Bucky or Sergei?” Sergei opened his mouth to answer, but Steve just shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, come on, baby, let’s go see Sir Smiles-A-Lot.”

Sergei let himself be dragged.

Didn’t matter?

When they arrived in front of a door marked “Commissioner Phillips VCU,” neither Sergei nor Bucky had managed to crack that three-word puzzle. It didn’t matter? That he was Bucky? Or Sergei? That he was hiding? Or was it about the spit thing? But then, “baby?”

It took the Bucky-Sergei blend some time to divert his attention from his inner agitation to Phillips’ beady-eyed stare and Steve’s discreet hand gestures telling Sergei to sit down, _sit down_.

“Barnes.”

“Uhhh.”

Phillips squinted. “You do remember what chairs are?”

Bucky plopped down in the chair like a sack of potatoes. He felt shaky, but Sergei was propping him up mentally. If he was “baby” and it didn’t matter who he was, did Steve love Sergei too?

Phillips nodded, and would have spoken if someone hadn’t knocked on the door. “What now?” Phillips bellowed at the door, which opened with a timid creak.

“Uh, Chief? Sir?” Gabe Jones passed his head through the door. “Commissioner? Oh hey, Rogers! Barnes!”

“Jones. Take a breath.”

“Commissioner, we’ve taken the credentials of the whole Vice unit. Most of the detectives have been escorted out with their stuff, and I’ve personally made the Work Placement call. Those guys should be on the unemployed roll call tomorrow. There’s just one problem.”

Phillips bobbed his head. “Yeah, problems. Do I want to hear about this problem?”

“Hmmyeah, might wanna hear about it. It’s Rollins, sir. He’s like… totally out of it. Also Lukin’s home has been surrounded, they’re searching it, but Lukin is now holed up in his office, won’t let people enter, and when he saw all of us come in, he just mumbled something, Rollins froze, and now Lukin’s behind his desk glaring at us, and so, uh, what do we do? Do we arrest him?”

“Well, you damn well aren’t going to offer him flowers, son.”

Bucky stayed frozen on the spot. The wave of confusion from Steve’s offhand remark hadn’t abated yet when another wave of intense relief mixed in with blind terror overcame him. Steve turned in his chair towards Gabe. “I’d be fucking delighted to arrest him for you, Gabe.”

Gabe beamed at Steve; they had always been pretty in tune, Steve’s grating personality suiting Gabe’s snark just fine.

“Rogers, you stay put. Don’t want you messing up the case with a conflict of interest before it gets reviewed by Oversight.”

Steve spluttered, surely trying hopping between self-righteous indignation, his feelings over the whole Lukin thing, and arguing his case.

“Don’t want to hear it, Rogers. You do recall you both are victims of Lukin, here, right? Not just Barnes? I know you’ve got the sad eyes down pat, Barnes, but you, Rogers, you got spaced.”

This argument pulled the rug out from under Steve’s feet, and his arguments stammered to a halt. His shoulders slumped, throwing the bumpy metal spine under his shirt into sharp relief, like the crest on a tiny defeated dinosaur, roaring one second, vanquished the next.

This was so not like Steve. Bucky put his left hand on Phillips’ desk to get his attention. “Could we at least witness the arrest, Commissioner?” Bucky licked his lips nervously.

He wasn’t sure he could look Lukin in the eyes and not cower in terror, but he could do it for Steve, and perhaps he should do it for himself. He had the benefit of having Sergei like a security blanket of empty bravado protecting his squishy traumatised Bucky insides — at least that’s how he had described himself to Claire, who had said that as long as the both of them were okay with that, it wasn’t the unhealthiest coping mechanism.

“Please, Phillips. It’s just. It’s about closure.” Bucky checked on Steve, who was looking at him wonderingly. “I’d like my nightmares starring that son of a bitch to shift into restful sleep, is all.”

Phillips’ jaw worked. “No can do. However, I called you here for something, Rogers. We need you to use that sense of yours and do a sweep of the Vice bullpen.” As Steve heard this, he fairly vibrated out of his seat. They’d get to see the evil son of a bitch get escorted out. Phillips pointed at the both of them. “You toe the line.”

They both nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Phillips sat back in his chair and grunted. “Okay, Jones, you go arrest that trashbag. Barnes, Rogers, no shenanigans.”

The Vice Bullpen wasn’t that far, on the same storey as Phillips and other higher-ups’ offices. Steve and Bucky walked over, took a left in a deserted corridor, and ended up in an overcrowded open plan office, not dissimilar to the one assigned to the Violent Crimes Unit. Officers from both VCU and Frauds were milling about, opening desks now emptied of the personal effects of their former detectives. Two former Vice Detectives were still packing up under the watchful eye of Detective Martinetti, the most efficient Fraud detective there was.

And smack dab in the middle of the maelstrom of people was… Rollins.

Bucky didn’t actually notice him right away, but the wince and gasp from Steve was unmissable and put him on alert. Steve put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder and his other hand to his own temple, as if in pain.

“Steve? What…”

“The noise… Bucky.” Bucky put himself in front of Steve, which was useless, he knew. The way Steve was acting, he must have been hearing some device in the room, and blocking the view would do absolutely nothing.

But he wanted to feel like he was shielding Steve a little. “How can I help?”

Steve shook his head, “I think… I think it’s Rollins, Bucky.”

“He’s got it too?” Damn, Bucky had suspected something like that was possible. That he wasn’t the first one to have fallen victim to one of Lukin’s little experiments.

“It’s different. I think. But similar.” Steve shook his head again, as if he could shake off the sounds that only he could hear. “We should call Shuri.”

And that, Bucky could do something about that. He went over to one of the three very confused Cadets surrounding the petrified Rollins, who was currently staring into space, sporadically repeating, “Okay. Yes Sir. Can do.” He told the Cadet to help Rollins vacate the premises, put him in a calm place, and call Shuri.

As Rollins was escorted out, Bucky saw the frown of tension on Steve’s face ease up. Steve smiled at him and then looked around. “Phew… that one was a doozy. I don’t… think I hear anything else suspicious. Phillips will be pleased.”

Bucky smiled back at him and they both relaxed, but then their smiles froze when they heard Lukin’s vociferous voice echoing out from another part of the floor. They heard him long before they saw him being walked down the aisle of his downfall. His irate roars grew and defined themselves into cries about the grave mistakes they all were making. At the first intelligible yell, Bucky felt cold sweat break out over his whole body, like the wave of cold emptiness that had washed away all of him when he’d still had the blackbox in his neck.

Bucky startled when Steve laced their fingers together. “Don’t stay for my sake, Bucky. Please.”

Bucky shook his head, as Lukin barked yet another vain order to let him go. “Can’t leave you alone.”

Steve rubbed his thumb over Bucky’s knuckles. “Sergei’ll be here.” He swung Bucky’s hand. “If he’s here, you’re here. Neither of you would leave me, anyway.”

Bucky closed his eyes, let himself feel brasher, made of harder stuff. Steve’s hand in his felt like the center of the solar system, everything revolving around this point. Like the hand his unnamed shrink had given him that one time in the hospital.

“You! **YOU**!” Lukin bellowed, and Sergei tried to put himself between Steve and Lukin on reflex, but Steve was having none of it and refused to budge. Three detectives were holding Lukin with much difficulty as he struggled and tried to throw himself at Steve. “You absolute non-human scum! You were dead, you should be DEAD!” One of the detectives — Gabe — Gabe swore and scrambled to get a grip on Lukin’s shoulder as he tried to slip away.

“Sir, stop struggling.” Gabe’s composure was really something to write home about.

“You should’ve tried harder,” Steve said.

Sergei felt in tune with Bucky right at this instant. This wasn’t supposed to be Steve’s occasion for verbal suplexes. This wasn’t the time for vindication. This was supposed to be relief. Relief at seeing the man who had tried to kill them both, incite strife in the colony, and sully their name be marched out with great prejudice.

Lukin snarled, seething, nearly rabid in his hate. “If our whole society collapses, it’ll be because of people like you,” and he spat at Steve’s feet, which seemed like a common occurrence in guys from Vice. He turned to Sergei and barked, “New orders!”

Sergei’s nostrils flared. Hearing the sentence now was just as painful as before, but for a whole other set of reasons.

“Save your breath.” What the fuck did Lukin think he could do here? Order him to what? Kill everybody in the building? Freeze and go brain-dead like Rollins?

Lukin blanched, and Gabe and his two sidekicks took advantage of his shock to drag him towards the elevators.

Why so shocked, though? Was it because he really had thought he could rely on Bucky to… do some last-minute grand gesture of horrific… villainy? Or because this was the proof that — since he had no hold on Bucky’s mind anymore — the detectives knew about the implant, which might be the most incriminating evidence of all?

How ironic that someone so hateful towards transhumanists and cyborgs would use cybernetic implants as a way to retain obedient pawns. How ironic that the Commissioner from the one unit responsible for fighting illegal implants would use one to further his plans.

“He’s really gonna be gone…”

Sergei smiled. “Good riddance.” And kissed Steve’s temple without so much as an afterthought.

Steve looked at him, low-key flabbergasted, because Sergei really wasn’t one for human contact or displays of affection, be they private or public. He was also not Steve’s boyfriend. At least, Steve thought he wasn’t. Bucky was.

They looked at each other, both flustered and unable to react, Steve gaping like a fish while Sergei and Bucky were having their second or third identity crisis of the day.

“Barnes! Rogers!” Jesus be praised for irate commissioners and their innate sense of timing. “Inside.”

Phillips didn’t even wait for them to be seated before he closed the door to his office and started throwing paperwork at them.

“I hope you’ll have sweet dreams now, Barnes.” Sergei nodded dutifully. “Good. I need you both to sign this heap of red tape.”

Steve took the proffered stylus and poked at the screen embedded in Phillips’ desk before them. “What is it?”

“Signed affidavit you won’t try to go near Aleksander Lukin. Ot try to go near any ex-Vice before the end of their job placement cycle. By the way, some will most likely reapply for their old jobs and ranks, they have a right to, but I think the rules might be way stricter than they were under Lukin.”

“What. Uhm… what’s going to happen to Rumlow? Same as the others?” Bucky asked. He hadn’t made up his mind on what he wished for Rumlow. Reform? Find a real purpose in life? Die cooked by the Sun on the Space windows?

Phillips raised an eyebrow. “Do you worry about every single one of your partners?”

Steve grunted. “Tell me he fell into a manhole.”

“Rumlow came to me two weeks ago when you both had just resurfaced and handed me his notice. Your survival still was on a need-to-know basis, so I have no idea how he guessed, but he said he didn’t like smelling other people’s shit so—”

“—when someone takes a crap under his nose…” Bucky scoffed. “Yeah, he knew something was wrong and preferred to get the hell out of dodge.” Bucky shook his head. “Never hire him back.”

“Laziness makes the bed of criminality. Although, if only someone else among us had had the same innate sense of impending doom as Brock fucking Rumlow, we might have ousted all those assholes with less collateral damage.” Steve winced, but Bucky stayed stoic, feeling justified in having spurred Lukin into action by baiting himself. But… the current audience might not be very receptive to this argument. “Right. So the next red tape roll are your statements, taken by Dugan, and signed testimony by Dr Temple. You need to cosign about the psychological damages. Then there is the list of evidence entered to the case on your behalf. And on that note…”

Steve was scrolling through the incredible number of pages to sign, but almost immediately decided to forfeit everything and fetched his mandazi box back from under his chair for a snack.

Actually, that wasn’t such a bad idea.

“You better clean your greasy fingers, Rogers, this is a toddler-free area,” Phillips grumbled. “Right, evidence. For two guys wandering around with their hands in their pockets and then washing up on my doorstep, you sure brought along a lot of stuff. We will need your input if we find anything similar to that implant you had in your neck in the next raid, Barnes. As you both may know, Vice is supposed to suss out smuggling and embezzlement. We currently have no idea how Lukin managed to fudge the numbers, but by using all his team to crack down in subtle and different ways on transhuman movements, he’s let the smuggling fall by the wayside. I’d bet my left nut that once we compare your implant history, shared by this Zenzele Shuri ka Tchaka woman, we’ll discover he found those illegal implants during a raid a long time ago.”

Bucky reflexively touched the spot on his neck, tracing the scar. It felt tender, even though the skin had healed a while back without any problems.

“Questions?”

Steve nodded quickly but was still munching on his mandazi, and one baleful look from Bucky stopped him before he began speaking at Phillips with his mouth full.

“Right… Next!” He pointed at the screen in front of them again. “There are several certificates you both need to sign. Rogers, one for reintegration into our ranks. Barnes, those are for putting you back on my roster. There is also the whole Sergei Smerdyakov lunacy… No forms exist for this, I can’t really bring back from the dead a fifty-year old corpse, so I filed a form for immigrant status for the guy so that he has an administrative existence for as long as he’s…” — Phillips made circles with his finger around his temple — “ _around_.”

Bucky could feel how choked up that made Sergei, so he gave a heartfelt thanks to Phillips, who brushed off the acknowledgement. “Don’t mention it. Next, Rogers.” Phillips pinched the bridge of his nose. “Rogers, Rogers, Rogers. Remember how we had to take a blood sample and match your implants to the database to show proof of your existence? I’m sorry to say that the blood sample disintegrates too quickly for analysis and all your implants now have a signature unreadable by common instruments.”

Steve looked at Phillips expectantly, waiting for the last words to make sense.

“Son. As of right now, you still don’t exist.”

“What? Excuse me, sir, what?”

“It’s sir, what sir, and yes. But you are in luck, because it seems that another person has the same problem as you. His name is Loki Laufeyson, PhD in pain in my ass, and he has _opinions_ on this, as well as on everything else under the sun.” He gestured to the whole room and its diplomas on the wall, and Steve could easily see Loki critiquing the frames as tacky and the room as lackluster. “Where the fuck did you find that guy? How has he survived living in a tin can in space up till now? Don’t answer me, Rogers, I don’t need your sass.”

“Anyhow, this guy, in between impassioned pleas to be allowed to set fire to the Moon Military Base, explained that it was possible that the wipeout thing had merged your implants so much with your body that the original specific signatures were altered. So congratulations, Rogers, you and your friend have managed to make the mainframe hiccup and also to become… someone else I guess? Laufeyson was pretty happy to brag in my goddamn face how punily human I was and how superiorly transcendent he was.”

Bucky spotted the exact moment Steve went from curious and puzzled to uncomprehending and horrified. It was the flush on his cheeks and the stammered inarticulate questions he tried to ask. The stylus rolling onto the desk from his slackened hand. Bucky put his hand on Steve’s arm, because one thing he had learned in the last few weeks was how very tactile Steve had become.

“Okay, so what does this mean for Steve?” he asked in his stead.

“Means signing this form and a temporary immigrant card like you have, so we can sort it out. What happened to you both is covered by the job hazards insurance and universal healthcare, you might be in a paperwork limbo, but that shrink of yours will follow you.” Phillips waited for them to react, but Steve seemed to still be shocked into silence. “Alright. One last thing, and then I’ll release you, and you can both go back to your flat.”

Bucky rubbed his hand down Steve’s arm to try and bring some awareness back to him. Meanwhile, Phillips visibly took the “the shorter this is, the quicker they’ll be having a breakdown in an adequate place that is not my office” option.

“Martina Ahmed’s case has been definitively tied into the broader problem of SAF. For all that your friend Laufeyson would like to buy every single soldier a one-way ticket to Titan, the solution to this problem is way more complicated than what we can handle. You must have read the headlines. Some government official might come to you both to ask you further questions once your testimony — especially yours, Rogers — hits their desk. Again, be frank. This colony has no use for wasting money, people, and time on Administrations that could turn on their own people’s interests.”

Steve and Bucky both stared at Phillips, for once unsure of his point. He sighed longsufferingly.

“What I meant to say is, you did it, you did your job as detectives and found the truth, sought what was hidden. Private Gold and Private Jenkins have been brought back to the colony and will be tried. There is one less widow in this universe, wondering what happened to their significant other. You didn’t stop, even faced with roadblocks and meddling. I.” He huffed out a breath and Steve and Bucky looked at each other, nonplussed at the unusual floundering for words from Phillips. “Listen, boys, this is why you both might be some of the best detectives I have. However, after such an accumulation of trauma, it would be unethical of me not to advise you to… think long and hard about your future. You will still be on the roll call, and you have time to figure your shit out. But traumatised cops always end up being bad cops, in one way or another. And we don’t need that shit here.”

In the following silence, Phillips looked them both in the eyes, as if checking that his message had been received loud and clear.

“Okay, now go, out of my sight. Your puppy-eyed faces are giving me hives.”

* * *

Steve felt like a heel. For someone who had promised to never let Bucky out of his sight, after leaving Phillips’ office, he sure had tried to get Bucky quickly distracted by a coworker coming their way after.

The fact that it wasn’t for nefarious purposes didn’t abate his feeling of guilt, so he stood next to the doorway to VCU’s bullpen while he made the call. That way, he could still hear Bucky talking with Dernier and having his own emotional reunion, with Steve out of the way.

The phone rang and Steve chewed his bottom lip, nervously pulling at his hair. “Come on, answer, you piece of shit…”

“Hello?”

“Loki.” He heard rustling on the other side of the line. “It’s me, Steve.”

“Oh, yeah, begins with a stee, ends with a vee…” Loki said disinterestedly. “I think I know someone with that name?”

Steve grunted. He had less than zero time for Loki’s antics. “Loki, the fuck is this stuff about not being human anymore?”

If Loki was surprised by the subject, it didn’t show. “Well, I’m not sure if you noticed, but there aren’t a lot of people around who melded with an autonomous self-replicating metamaterial.” He giggled and whispered, “Stop it!” before going on with his explanation. “I doubt our genetic material has been altered — or at least not too much —, but we are for sure quite outside the norm of what’s considered a human being.”

The world was spinning a bit, so Steve closed his eyes and realized that this might be an encroaching panic attack. He felt the wipeout respond to his body’s distress signals by sounding its own set of alarm bells. Steve slowed his breathing and tried to breathe as deeply as possible. Now was not the time.

Oh shit. Not really human.

“Fuck.”

“Hmmmmmm.” Was that a moan?

“Loki?”

“Yes?”

“Are you fucking Thor right now?”

Loki tsked and Steve could hear some more rustling and a grunt on the other side. Oh shit, what had he interrupted? “Not right now, but if this call goes any further, I might have to ask for your consent.”

“Ew, Loki, oh my god.”

“Right, good talk.

“Wait! Wait, wait!”

“What, Steve?” And that was a definite moan, and Loki had a tremor to his voice, oh god.

“Is it dangerous? To. Fuck. With.” The words died in his throat and Steve choked on them.

“Ooooh yeah, Thor is always dangerous. Oh, my. Again!”

Shit, Steve was so dumb. He’d seen them both right after they had very obviously engaged in sexual intercourse. “Is there any special protection I’d need to have sex with Bucky?” Steve whispered with an urgency he had a difficult time controlling. This was serious. If Loki could do it, he could too, right? How?

Steve opened his eyes and, Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the holiest of fucks, there was Bucky, planted right in front of him.

“Oh! Oooooh… No! No danger, Detective! No transmission through cum! Ha!”

He must have come over while Steve had his eyes closed, and with no more implants, Steve couldn’t hear him closing in.

“Oh, god!” One pornographic moan resonated from his phone and Steve looked at it, slack jawed and insanely embarrassed. “Bye, Detective!” Loki declared and the call cut off, and now Steve had to face the fact that he’d more or less — more, definitely more — used Loki as a sex advice magazine column, without having discussed sex prior with Bucky.

“I can explain.”

Bucky nodded sagely, albeit a bit embarrassed himself judging from his rosy cheeks. “I’m sure you can.”

“Maybe not here.”

“Yes, maybe not.”

Oh shit. “Are you mad?”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Come on, Steve, let’s have this conversation elsewhere.”

Steve squeaked out his assent and they took the lift, Steve faintly vibrating out of his skin, the wipeout still ringing bells like there was going to be an air raid in the next few minutes.

Once in the wooded park in front of the Bullpen building, Steve shivered and shook with his pent-up antsiness for a second.

Bucky looked at him… smirking? “You okay?”

Steve nodded jerkily. “Yeah…” He gulped, hesitating over whether to repeat his question. “Are you mad?”

Bucky laughed. “Oh, yeah, so mad that my boyfriend would like to have sex with me and asked someone if it was safe to do so.” He snorted, then embraced Steve suddenly. _Oh_. He murmured in Steve’s ear, taking advantage of his stupor, “So, so very mad that you thought of my safety first. Terrible.” Steve shivered, feeling Bucky’s breath against his earlobe, his neck.

Steve stayed frozen, his embarrassment now compounded by the thought that if Bucky and — or? — Sergei were interested in sex, it would mean showing his body. His inhuman body.

“Steve.”

He nodded.

“I can feel you panicking.”

“… I am.”

Bucky sighed. “Come on, let’s go home.”

* * *

As soon as they opened the door, Steve scampered inside like a frightened hare and disappeared into the bathroom.

Bucky sighed heavily, baffled by his erratic behaviour. If Steve had asked Loki about sex, Bucky could guess that it was related to him. But then Steve had behaved shiftily for the whole commute back from the Bullpen and had barely talked. It seemed that the weird horror that had seized him during Phillips’ talk had carried over to now.

Which didn’t really help Bucky to understand what was happening. And no advice was forthcoming from Sergei because he wasn’t a fucking fortune cookie, okay?

“Alright.”

He could either keep to himself and let Steve angst alone for however much time he needed to solve his crisis, or he could try to shoulder his way into Steve’s bubble of panic and pull him out of it. Contrary to the last few weeks, where Bucky had had so much stuff on his plate that he’d had to watch Steve’s discreet meltdowns from afar, now he felt…

Better.

Maybe settled.

For some value of better and settled. He still had Sergei’s consciousness lurking and talking and thinking, but they switched more fluidly from one to the other. His memories were like an optical illusion, showing him a very clear past that belonged to him, and suddenly his brain would catch on shapes, vague feelings, and he would remember a country that he’d never seen, people he’d never met, like seeing the silhouette of the duck and then being unable to discern its shape because all you could see was the rabbit.

So he was not at his best, but he was better.

And so now, he couldn’t just curl up in a ball on his bed and wait for his thoughts to clear, unable to reach out or comfort Steve as he was stirring himself into a frenzy in another room.

Decision made, Bucky walked lightly to the bathroom door and knocked. “Steve, you okay?”

He heard a bang and a swear word. “Yeah, m’okay!”

 _Did Steve sound choked up?_ “Can I come in?”

“Uhhh, yea—no! W—”

But Bucky had already pushed the door open and found Steve was doing his best impression of a frightened hare, again.

“Steve?”

He had his shirt hiked up under his armpits and looked like he’d been caught trying to roll it down. He was also mostly facing the door, and he was clearly distressed beyond belief, his fine blond hair in disarray and his eyes red. In the mirror, Bucky could see most of his back.

He could see his pale skin and the faint shape of his floating ribs, the torsion of his muscles — because Steve might be skinny, but he wasn’t cooked spaghetti, either — and he saw his prosthetic spine, the vertebrae and their dull shine, dark grey with the inner core of flexible fibres in a reddish sheath that peeked through. He could see how the skin next to the prosthetic was now greyish, crisscrossed with what looked like veins, but were really more like a network of roots, the same colour as the spine. There was no clear end to the skin or the prosthetic, both were welded together, melted, fused. A gradient.

Transfixed by the sight, Bucky nearly missed Steve’s breath hiccuping and his recoil.

“Steve?” Bucky repeated.

Steve let his shirt fall and smoothed it over his stomach, evading Bucky’s gaze. “Sorry, sorry.”

“What for?” Bucky took a step inside the bathroom and immediately stopped when Steve took a step backwards, only to be stopped by the sink. Okay, no making him feel trapped. Bucky took a step back.

“I don’t know.” Steve seemed increasingly agitated and shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.” Then he shouldered past Bucky and out the bathroom door.

“Wait, Steve.” Bucky caught Steve’s arm as he passed him by. “Come on, look at me.” Okay, Steve had been agitated ever since Phillips’ office. “Was it something that happened during Phillips’ review?”

Steve had stopped and his arm was slack in Bucky’s hand, but he still wouldn’t look at him.

“Steve. What happened?” He tried to shake Steve’s arm a bit, to get him to look back, but to no avail. “What’s going on?”

At that, Steve finally glanced up, and he looked both astonished and angry. “You’re asking me what’s going on, like you didn’t see me?”

What? “See you? See you when?”

Steve shook Bucky off and threw his hands down, worked up and annoyed. “Right now!”

“What the fuck? You were standing with your shirt half off? What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

Steve’s annoyance ramped up even more, and he visibly grappled with several choice words before choosing to point his finger at Bucky — like he was accusing him of something? — and saying, “You are a fucking asshole.” Then he whirled around and marched into his room.

Bucky followed, because like hell was he letting Steve off the hook with this horseshit. “Steve, I have no fucking idea what you’re on about.”

Steve let out an inarticulate growl and spun towards Bucky. “Me!”

“You?”

Steve threw his hands in the air. “Yes!”

Bucky was so lost that scientists would have needed to invent a new celestial coordinate system in order to find him. “Okay, just. Okay. Can you— can we sit down? Take a breath? Talk? In that order, if possible?”

Steve let himself fall backwards; the bedroom was so small that he could do this in any corner of the room and still end up half lying on the bed. Bucky sat down next to Steve, much more sedately. Steve was lying with his legs half off the bed and his arms outstretched across the whole width, staring at the ceiling and making a face Bucky associated with his “passively plotting a way to self-detonate” mood.

“Can I touch you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay.” He reached over and put his hand on Steve’s left thigh. And waited.

They might have changed a lot, they might be different versions of themselves, but this wasn’t the first nonsensical blow-up he had witnessed. Bucky knew Steve and how he worked, and he didn’t have access to the often winding roads of his thoughts, but…

Steve lost patience quickly — because silence and patience had always been Bucky’s best allies — and jerkily turned his head to look at him. “You really don’t understand, do you?”

“No. But I want to.”

Steve bit his lip. “Bucky. I’m just… You heard him, I’m not human anymore.”

It was only Steve’s very evident distress that prevented Bucky from scoffing. Because fuck that. “Seriously, Steve? Is Phillips the new judge of humanity? Did you used to have a small plastic card with your name on it and ‘human’ embossed next to your age or something?”

Steve frowned and turned his head the other way, looking at the wall. “I fucking knew you wouldn’t take this seriously.”

“No, wait, Steve, I am taking this seriously!” Steve shifted his leg so that Bucky’s hand fell from it. “Steve. Did any doctor examine you and tell you, verbatim, that you weren’t human anymore?”

“Fuck off.”

“No, I’m not fucking off, this is important. Who told you, huh? Who decided _for you_ , that you were what? A new species? An android? Who? Fucking Loki?”

Steve mumbled unintelligibly and turned on his side, leaving only his back visible for Bucky. Pillbug Steve.

“Tell me, Steve. Who said, ‘Oh sorry, pool’s closed, only humans allowed?’ Oh, and by the way, who cares if you are a new species, Steve, goddamnit, you’re still the same fantastic guy who’s currently grating on my nerves like crazy!”

“Oh, you’re one to talk,” Steve grumbled moodily, still fully imitating a pillbug to the best of his ability.

“Yeah, well, takes one to know one, huh?” Bucky kneeled on the bed and put his hand on Steve’s hunched shoulder. He shook it off. “Steve, please.” He put his hand on his shoulder again and this time, Steve just hunched further, but let him touch, so it was kind of a win. A half win. “Steve. You could have changed species or mutated into an entirely new person, you could have a fucking robot body and I wouldn’t care. Because you’re you, and I’m me, and we’ve both evolved a lot recently, but look at us.”

He heard Steve sniffle and wished he could imbue his touch with… he didn’t know. He just wished light would finally shine on Steve. Show him how amazing he was.

“Look at us, Steve. We made it and it’s all out of our hands, now. We set something in motion and now we can rest. We both changed, and in spite of it, we still found each other again.”

Steve let out the softest sob and when he finally spoke, his voice sounded so croaky that it broke Bucky’s heart. “My blood can’t even be analysed. Loki said maybe— maybe our DNA… I don’t know what I am. You saw it, you _saw_. My spine. It’s so…” Bucky slowly stroked Steve’s shoulder, and gently trailed his hand along Steve’s neck and into his hair, petting him.

“It’s so… ?”

“So alien,” he said, distraught, and twisted around once again to face Bucky, dislodging his hand. “I look like a fucking alien, Buck. And it seems that I am one.”

“Nuh-uh, stop. No.” Bucky put his hand on Steve’s mouth when he saw him getting ready to start a rant against himself. “Nope. First, all that ‘I’m an alien’ bullshit comes from you, and you alone at the moment. Second of all, if you are alien, then fuck me sideways, Steve, you are the most beautiful alien I’ve ever seen.”

Steve looked… riotous.

“Oh, look! How strange. You hate compliments just as much as before. I really wonder wh—” Steve licked his palm. “Ugh, Steve.” Steve tried to bite him and Bucky shifted his hand to his jaw, his thumb right beneath Steve’s bottom lip. “Gorgeous.”

“Stop.” Steve frowned hard.

“I think the part I love most is your eyes.”

Steve rolled them as if this was a joke. Regardless, Bucky was undeterred. He had a point to make.

“When we were kids, you know when our mums brought us to the lake? It amazed me at the time, how your eyes were the same blue as the lake. The colour of water.”

“It’s just the cyanobacteria making the lake look bright blue, Bucky.”

“Shhh.” Bucky smiled and pushed slightly with his thumb, making Steve open his mouth slightly, and he dove in for a brief kiss with the barest hint of tongue. “Don’t talk. Just let me show you how I see you.”

Steve’s lips moved under his, but no words came out.

Bucky sat back up and used his hand to guide Steve to sit up in front of him. Steve obeyed, confused, maybe still a bit annoyed at having been complimented, and unwound himself from the foetal position he had been in. Bucky smiled encouragingly and grabbed his hands, stared into Steve’s eyes, and said, with the sincerest tone he had in stock, “You are beautiful and perfect to me.”

Steve squirmed. Bucky brought his right hand to Steve’s brow, tracing around his eye and delicately touching the bright copper spots where he had had implants grafted to help him see colours. Bucky had been there the first time Steve had been able to see green. He had looked right at Bucky and said, “Woah,” simple as that.

“I love your eyes, their colour and the way they’re framed by those small dots of golden orange. I love how when the sun shines right on you, I can see the copper wires, like laugh lines at the corner of your eyes.”

“Liar.”

That brought Bucky up short. “How so?”

“You hate implants.”

Bucky shook his head. “I hate having something inside me. I dread it even more now. But that’s a me problem.” He traced Steve’s cheekbone, his finger climbing back up to Steve’s temple. “But you’ve never had a problem with cybernetics. And to me, they helped you, they kept you healthy for the longest time. How can I not be grateful that you have implants?” He touched the outer chip of Steve’s cochlear implant, a round black pill-like thing, tiny like his pinkie fingernail, nestled right between his hairline and the shell of his ear. “They helped you see, and hear, and breathe, and stand straight. Walk and run. They were part of you long before they merged with you.”

Steve closed his eyes and bit his lip, his hands fisted in the fabric of his loose pair of linen trousers.

Bucky slid his hand behind Steve’s neck, fingers tangled in the hair at the back of his head and his palm right where his spine started.

“I’m going to regret not having to come over and set your spine straight. So infuriating. I loved having the excuse to touch you.”

Steve kept his eyes closed. “You can still touch me,” he whispered. “No pretexts needed anymore.”

“I can?” Steve nodded. “What if I do this?” Bucky now picked up his other hand and brought it on the other side of Steve’s neck, and deliberately stroked the skin and metal, the spot where one turned into the other.

Steve shivered but didn’t open his eyes. “Don’t… force yourself.”

Bucky kept stroking and shuffled closer so he would have better access. The sensation was strange, unique. Warm turning cool, soft turning unyielding. “I’m not. I’ve never felt something like this.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“It’s unique.” Bucky took Steve’s chin in his left hand and forced him to stop looking down at his knees. “It’s you.”

Steve’s chin trembled.

“It’s smooth skin and then even smoother metal. It’s your spine, your backbone, the only part I would let myself touch then, and the part I want to touch most now.”

Steve looked on the verge of tears. “You can’t be serious.”

Because his eyes were filling with unspilt tears, Bucky decided to make his point even more obvious. He kissed Steve and whispered against his lips. “I will worship every single centimetre of this body of yours.” He kissed the corner of Steve’s lips, then. “I’m going to undress you and look and touch all my fill and then some more.” His lips glided over Steve’s cheek. “Let me touch you, please.”

Steve exhaled shakily, like a surrender. “Please, Bucky.”

That sounded like invitation enough. Bucky leaned back just enough to strip his henley off, then got back to kissing Steve softly. He laid his hands on Steve’s still painfully-clenched fists, then slid them to the hem of his shirt.

He kissed along Steve’s jaw and right under his ear, where some wiring for the cochlear implant was now embedded in his skin, like a gold-and-silver tattoo. “I loved being the only one you’d let speak in your good ear, I was so happy when you got this implant, even though we fought about it.”

Steve let out a huff of air, warm and humid against Bucky’s neck. “We always fight about going to the doctor.” And then he finally reciprocated by putting his hands on each side of Bucky’s chest. “God, you are…”

“Mm mmm, today’s not about me.”

“Well, it should be.”

Bucky shut Steve up with a hard kiss, beginning with a certain intent, until Steve ran his tongue against the seam of Bucky’s lips. Then in an instant the kiss went from zero to sixty, with Steve biting at his bottom lip and Bucky breathing heavily into the kiss, bringing his arms all around Steve, hands on his back. Steve climbed into his lap and it felt…

Oh fuck, it felt so good. To let go. To feel Steve wholly there.

“Fuck, Steve.” Bucky licked back into Steve’s mouth, wishing he could devour him. Steve just hummed, his hands skittering all over Bucky’s skin, feeling him up, mapping him out. Bucky pulled at Steve’s shirt and tried to speak in between heated licks and kisses and bites. “Come on, take this—” He sucked on Steve’s lip and released it. “Take your shirt off.”

Steve jerked away all of a sudden, but Bucky still had his arms well wrapped around him, so he didn’t stray far.

“Come on, sunshine,” Bucky coaxed, as if he was taming a skittish, fluffy animal.

Steve didn’t let go of Bucky’s chest, didn’t make a move to undress. Bucky, telegraphing all his moves, took the hem of Steve’s shirt in hand and gradually lifted it until Steve had to raise his arms — he did, after closing his eyes like a child not wanting to see disaster — and Bucky took the shirt off and threw it to the floor.

“There you go.”

Steve keened, distressed again, eyes closed, agitated, so Bucky smooched him on the cheek, then on his nose.

"Hey."

Steve's eyes looked scared when he opened them, then hopeful. "Hey."

Bucky traced a line from his chin to his neck with the very tips of his fingers. Touched his Adam’s apple. "Your voice is so deep, sometimes it makes me shiver just hearing it.” He trailed his finger down and slid it across Steve’s collarbones. “And here, when you dress with those wide-collar shirts and your collarbones peek through. Steals my breath, everytime." He continued tracing an invisible line, a random pattern on his chest, and bent down to feel Steve's heartbeat with his lips and the scar from the heart surgery he'd had years ago. "Such a good heart. Half flesh and half mechanics. Maybe they put gold in there, that's why."

"Oh my god, you are too fucking cheesy."

Bucky surged up to kiss Steve again; he still hadn’t had enough of it, and Steve was finally getting distracted from his self-hatred. “I can’t get enough of this.” Steve’s arms went around his shoulders, and Bucky’s went at Steve’s waist, touching several different implant sites on their way, scars and grafts, soft skin and little moles alike. “I have all the proof I need here.”

Steve exhaled shakily once Bucky decided to migrate towards licking and sucking at his jaw and neck. “What proof?”

“Proof.” A bite on his trapezius. “Of your.” A kitten lick under his ear. “Humanity.” He slid his hands further around Steve and reached for the metal spine, his hands spanning the place where skin became cybernetics.

Steve gasped. His hands grasped at Bucky’s hair, clutching at the longer part at the top.

“I loved your crooked spine,” Bucky whispered hotly in his ear, biting the lobe to punctuate his declaration. “And I loved coming over to set your vertebra back onto your skin.” He buried his face in Steve’s hair, now a bit longer than the short crop he used to have. “I love how entrancing those cybernetics look, and I love the sensation…” He inhaled Steve’s scent, the smell of his hair and skin. “Of your body shuddering against mine when I do this.”

He caressed Steve’s back, following the long line of his spinal column, the bumps and ridges of his implant; Steve gasped again, and his body quaked, just like Bucky had thought it would.

“Ha! Buck!” He pulled lightly on Bucky’s hair, and Bucky retaliated by putting his hands on Steve’s ass — still in trousers, a tragedy — and pulling him even closer.

“You feel so” — Steve bit his lip and he exhaled shakily — “so good in my arms. Like—” Steve scratched his back and they moaned in unison, both feeling their desire keenly.

“Shut up.”

His hands spanned the whole of Steve’s back, and even with his eyes closed, it still felt like too much sensory input to touch, and smell, and hear all of Steve. “Can’t, sunshine, I can’t shut up about you.”

Steve put both of his hands on Bucky’s cheeks, and instead of kissing him, pushed with his thumbs on his lips. Bucky’s eyes flew open, as well as his mouth, surprised.

“Stop.” Steve traced his lip. “No more compliments.” And one of his thumbs ended up sliding into his mouth, so what was he to do but suck it?

He licked Steve’s finger, licked again, maybe nibbled on it some, but finally pulled his head away to be able to talk freely. “Nah. I’m not finished,” Bucky growled. He would worship Steve as he saw fit, goddamnit. “Your hair is—”

He didn’t even finish his sentence because Steve shoved him, which was surely intended to be playful, but ended up pushing him down on his back very brusquely, making him bounce on the comforter with a wheeze, since Steve had nudged his chest.

Wow.

He checked on Steve, still seated on his lap, but whose weight had stilled. And yeah, he looked like he was freaking out. “Steve?”

“Sorry.” He looked at his hands. “Sorry, sorrysorry…” and lurched out of Bucky’s lap, but Bucky was having none of it.

He managed to grab Steve before he climbed off the bed, and a brief scuffle ensued with Steve trying to get away, repeating he was sorry, so sorry, and Bucky grappling with him and bodily hauling him back onto the bed.

“Steve, no.” Steve batted his hands off, but Bucky rallied and caught one of them, his other hand keeping an iron grip on one of Steve’s thighs. “Steve! Steve! Fuck, stop! I found it sexy as hell, stop!”

Steve growled and twisted like a slinky, making them even more of a tangled mess of arms and legs.

“ _Stop_!”

Steve finally stopped fighting — for which Bucky was extremely grateful, because having a wrestling match while having a boner was a hazard and a half — and rebelliously stared at Bucky, his hair sticking out in all directions.

“I am so goddamn turned on by the fact that you can manhandle me, now, you have no idea.”

Steve, one arm dangling off the bed and another squished between both of them, blew on a strand of hair that had fallen right on his nose. “I’m a fucking danger to you.” Which sounded like a small, floofy bird threatening bloody murder.

Bucky ground his still very present erection against…. was that Steve’s shin?

“Well, I think we can both see I seem to have a danger kink, or that at least my boner is not at all discouraged by the threat you pose.”

Steve twisted like a pretzel to get a clear look. “Oh.” He looked back up at Bucky. “ _Oh_.”

Bucky flopped back onto the bedcover, now reassured that Steve wouldn’t try to make like a wet bar of soap and “whoops” out of his hands. Still basking in his feeling of victory, he watched as Steve carefully climbed back up into his lap.

“So…”

Bucky must have a problem. He must. Because they’d just had a wrestling match, and Steve was trying to talk to him, but once Bucky put his hands around Steve’s middle, seeing how big they were around that skinny waist, his ears stopped working. Steve had to have said something, sure, but really, Bucky was much too involved in his own moment. There must have been lust goggles involved, because nobody was that thin, and his hands had never been that huge.

“Bucky.”

“Hmm?” Bucky’s thumbs traced small circles on Steve’s hip bones, just prominent enough and fascinating enough for Bucky to wonder about what the fuck was going on with his sexual attraction. “I love how some of your bones just stick out a bit, how I can feel your floating ribs, those hips.”

Steve smirked, now suddenly all confident and assured — Bucky mentally high-fived himself, A for effort, Barnes. Steve stretched like a cat and made a show of gliding his hands down his body. Bucky watched, mesmerised, as Steve laced their fingers together, brought his hand up, and then…

“Oh god.”

Steve leered at Bucky and then licked at the tip of his index finger. “My turn.”

“Steve.”

“Hm?” Another kitten lick. And then he put the first knuckle in his mouth and sucked.

“Holy fucking shit.” Steve lewdly sucked, making small noises of contentment and using Bucky’s finger as a blowjob simulacrum for all he was worth.

Bucky broke first, surged up to meet Steve, and crashed their mouths together. Steve giggled, pushing up against him and taking over the kiss slowly, making it hotter and hotter, tongues pushing in and teeth nibbling, hot breaths and gasping moans. As Steve used his hands in Bucky’s hair to pull him down on his back, Bucky slipped his hands down the back of Steve’s trousers, holding on for dear life, his mind blown by Steve’s newfound confidence.

As they kissed like starved men, hungrily devouring each other’s mouths and necks, and jaws, and all the parts in between, they began pushing at each other's trousers — who started it, Bucky didn’t know, his last few non-fried brain cells were all entirely devoted to the task of french kissing Steve until they either stopped breathing or lost all sensation in their mouths. They both twisted against each other to try and get rid of the last of their clothes, which didn’t help their situations any, since every time they writhed, it ground their erections together.

It wasn’t pretty, but they were too distracted to notice. They finally managed to end up naked — a fact that Bucky only noticed because Steve pushed his hips against Bucky’s, which slotted both their erections together, and then Steve ground his hips and, well.

And, well, Bucky’s thoughts fizzled out to nothing.

“Bucky.”

Bucky just moaned, flat on his back on the bed.

“Buck,” Steve mumbled against his lips, “lube me up?”

Bucky had a momentary blank. What was lube? Who was lube? Where was anything? Who was he? Oh no, he was Bucky, okay no problem. “Uh.”

Steve pinched his nipple.

“Ah! Steve!” Steve bent down to lick at the abused flesh. “Steve! Stop, I…” He pushed at Steve’s head until he relented, sniggering. “You asshole, I can’t even remember my own name!”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “Am I fucking Sergei right now?”

Bucky snorted. “No!” God, Sergei was well ensconced in a bunker in his mind, far away from here.

“Can you imagine? We could have a threesome, just the both of us.”

“You’re such a dumbass.” He sat up and tried to shut Steve up with a kiss.

“Kiss one, get one for free.”

“Lube,” Bucky demanded and gnawed at Steve’s shoulder. “Okay, yes, lube,” he repeated dumbly.

Steve chuckled and pawed blindly at his bedside drawer.

Bucky took advantage of his distraction to whisper in his ear. “You’re so beautiful.”

“Oh my god, shut up.” Steve extracted himself to focus on the lube search and rescue, and when he sat back up on Bucky’s lap, they both looked at the brand new, unopened bottle.

“Didn’t see much use, huh?” Bucky smiled softly while absent-mindedly tracing random patterns on Steve’s thigh, so lean, so smooth, with a bit of dark blonde hair, wow. “Mine didn’t see much action either,” he said self-deprecatingly.

Steve rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, strange how massive trauma kind of fucks with your libido.” Steve kissed him on the brow. “But now that everything seems in working order,” — he kissed Bucky’s nose, but also ground once again on his erection — “let’s put this one to good use.”

Steve opened the lube while Bucky’s hands were otherwise occupied, caressing Steve’s thighs, touching his hip bones, and making circles closer and closer to his groin, tantalisingly close, teasingly close.

“Okay, I see that no prep-help will come from your side.”

“Sorry, Steve, it’s just…” Bucky’s gaze was fixed on where their limbs crossed and entwined and on all the places where their skin touched.

Steve squirted some lube onto his fingers. “Hm?”

“So svelte.”

Steve chuckled and his right hand disappeared behind his back — oh, oh dear, oh my, Steve was prepping _himself_ and not Bucky, he’d said so, huh, fuck, Bucky hadn’t really registered that tidbit of information and, oh shit, oh wow. As he pushed up a bit on his legs, Bucky felt the muscles work under his hands while he watched in fascination as Steve’s face went all focused.

“Fuck, you’re so beautiful.”

Steve hummed, eyes closed, concentrating and pleasuring himself with his own prep. “Shhhh.” Bucky touched Steve’s spine, making him shiver. He noticed when Steve added a second finger because of the way his shoulders were bunching and stretching.

He felt around, down, down Steve’s back and its powerful lines and the ridges of his vertebrae, until his fingers hit the small of his back. Steve writhed against him, and must have added a third finger, or at least hit his prostate, because he gasped Bucky’s name loudly, and put one hand on his shoulder for support, the other busy opening himself. And Bucky…

“Steve, please,” Bucky moaned. “Let me.”

Steve nodded, all quick and flushed, eyes scrunched up in pleasure. “Touch me, Bucky.”

Still sitting up and staring at Steve’s face, he slid his right hand down Steve’s ass, and with the tip of his finger, traced where Steve’s three — three! oh hell — fingers were pumping in and out. “Steve, Steve, please, tell me you’re ready.”

“Getting impatient?” Steve huffed a smothered laugh.

Bucky whined low, eyes closed and his forehead on Steve’s shoulder, feeling blindly at Steve’s asshole, the texture of lube on skin and the movements… “Please, please, please.”

Since he had closed his eyes, he didn’t get much of a warning before Steve shoved him roughly onto his back again.

“Oof.”

Steve smirked and got up on his knees, shuffling into position. Under Bucky’s awed and dazed gaze, he reached around, took hold Bucky’s cock just how he wanted it and — “Oh fuck, Ohmygod.” — impaled himself on Bucky’s dick. “Steve!”

Was it possible to die from an overload of sensations? Because, sure, Bucky hadn’t been the most sexually active guy in the Before Times, but still, sex had never felt as good then compared to now.

Steve was sitting on his cock, face drawn in ecstasy, and he felt like a hot clutch around Bucky’s dick, tight and warm and the perfect fit.

Fucking puzzle pieces falling together, falling into place.

Bucky could do nothing but hold onto Steve’s waist, breathing through his nose to try and keep from blowing his load right then and there, and Steve. Steve. He planted his hands on Bucky’s chest — leverage — “I’m gonna move, Buck…” and stretched like a slutty, cat-like, fae-person. And then he moved, moved until Bucky’s dick was barely inside and Bucky could do nothing, nothing but hold on.

“Steve…” Bucky keened. “Please.”

“Uh-uh.” Steve moved at a pace so glacially slow, it felt indolent, leisurely. “Please what?”

Shit, Bucky was going to cry, wasn’t he? “Please, move.” Steve clenched around him once, halfway down his shaft, and Bucky choked. “Why?”

Steve came and went one more time, humming to himself and pawing at Bucky’s chest. “Why what?”

“Why are you teasing me?” Bucky whined. His hands slipped to Steve’s ass, slipped until he could feel where they were joined. “Oh god, Steve.”

“I don’t know, Buck,” Steve huffed, and cried out when he felt Bucky’s finger touch him there. “Maybe you should” — he paused, and Bucky cried in frustration. — “you should praise me again, give me some, oh!” Bucky hadn’t been able to stop himself from pushing up into Steve and the sheer relief made him sob.

Steve tutted. “Baby, be a good boy.”

Bucky was a bit lost. “Steve…” Steve had stopped riding him altogether, and now Bucky felt so confused. He wanted — wanted, wanted, wanted so much — but Steve was, he was just too much.

“Come on, baby. Incentive.” Steve kissed Bucky, as if this would wake him up from the haze he was in. “Come on, tell me I’m beautiful.”

Bucky blinked up at Steve, and of course he was beautiful. Of course! “You are, so. You are so handsome.” Steve beamed down at him, like— “Sunshine.”

Steve kissed him and murmured “perfect” onto his lips before finally — oh my god, fucking finally — moving his hips.

Bucky tried gathering together the three brain cells he had left and wished Sergei hadn’t deserted him during this… this torture. This sex-crazed ordeal. “I fucking love your legs, you got legs for days, can’t get enough.”

Steve hummed encouragingly and picked up speed, beginning to ride Bucky in earnest.

Bucky shifted his hands from Steve’s ass to his everywhere— he had no target in mind. He just wanted to touch him all over. His left hand settled on the small of Steve’s back, his right buried in Steve’s wispy blond hair.

“I can’t wait— ah!” Bucky lost his train of thought when Steve rolled his hips in a very specific way. When praise stopped coming, Steve slowed down his riding, surprising a whine out of Bucky.

“Can’t wait what?” Steve growled at him with a kiss and a huff.

“I! Steve!” He tried to push up into him again but Steve just sat back onto his cock. He was buried to the hilt and incapable of moving, now, because Steve was stronger than he was, and, “I can’t wait for you to fuck me! Please!”

Steve moved again, saving Bucky from going out of his mind. “Oh yeah, I’ll fuck you, don’t worry, baby.”

“I, I just.” He could feel Steve’s dick, slapping rhythmically between their bodies as Steve rode him.

“Use your words, baby. You talk, I’ll ride.” Steve’s breaths were starting to come ragged and uneven.

“Your body. So gorgeous. Wanna choke on your cock. Eat you out. Please, sunshine, oh!”

Steve had sat back up at some point during that tiny confession and, he was, he was bouncing on Bucky’s cock, “Oh fuck, Bucky!”

Bucky was going to lose his goddamn mind. His body felt like it was on fucking fire.

“Buck!” Steve clenched again, his thighs working, his hands now on Bucky’s thighs. He was exposed like a painting, his eyes slits of blue looking at Bucky, and Bucky, really, he had to hold on for dear life, so he brought his hands up behind him to the headboard and gripped it like a lifeline, feeling that zing of electricity coursing down his back, hot and cold pooling in his groin, he was so very close! But he—

“Oh my fucking god, Steve!”

“Buck! I—” Steve let out an inarticulate shout.

All the tension accumulated in the last moments suddenly broke like a spring uncoiling all of a sudden, and Bucky cried out, then groaned, as he felt himself come and come and his nerve endings were barely functioning, but he could still feel Steve clenching down on him and ropes of come spurting all over him — them, surely.

He knew his eyes were open but he wasn’t really registering what he was seeing. The ceiling maybe?

He might have gone a bit out of his mind.

He felt Steve slump down onto him, like the sweetest weighted blanket. They spent the next… however long, in that position, Steve lying on top of him, Bucky mindlessly drawing spirals on Steve’s back, and Steve catching his breath on Bucky’s chest as he grew soft.

From his vantage point, Bucky could look at Steve’s spine, so he observed, wonderingly, still slightly dazed, both of them silent, until he broke the quiet.

“So, do you believe me now?”

Steve sighed. Didn’t answer for the longest time. Bucky heard him sniff at some point too.

“Maybe?”

Bucky kissed Steve’s temple. “I’ll work on it then, sunshine. Make you switch from ‘maybe’ to ‘of course.’”

They would have to move soon, or they’d get stuck together.

Steve sniffed again, but Bucky could feel his smile against his skin. “‘M lookin’ forward to you trying to convince me, then.”

“Repeatedly?”

“Repeatedly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * сукаблядь: [sukablyad'] son of a bitch, litt. Bitch-slut
> 



	13. Binary Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
> 
> ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

### Epilogue: Binary Stars

A binary star is a star system consisting of two stars orbiting around their common barycenter. Systems of two or more stars are called multiple star systems. These systems, especially when more distant, often appear to the unaided eye as a single point of light, and are then revealed as multiple by other means.

`— Wikipedia, “Binary stars”`

Spacers have several bank holidays. And since none of them are related to religion, they even called them bankdays — which is one of the many quirks of language to learn when visiting Space colonies.

The first bankday is Laika Day, on the third of November, which celebrates the first animal flight in space and the death of the dog Laika. On this day, all Lagrange Four authorised pet owners go out and parade with their pets, people bake dog treats, and butchers have sales on lungs, innards and bones for cats and dogs. Those who don’t have pets are allowed to go feed the birds or leave special treats for the wild animals inhabiting the wild segments (see “Colony districts and Asteroid dome divisions” p. 52) of the Colony. In domes, where animals are absent, insects used for plant cultivation in dome gardens are given a drop of sugared water — a treat in those places, where sugar, salt and water are rationed.

The second most popular bankday is on the twentieth of July, which celebrates the Moon landing. Most of the colonies, bases, and domes and the spacecraft crews get a day off, like on all other bankdays, and Spacers will prepare all day long for the celebrations of the local night cycle. [Projections of the recording of the approach and landing of Apollo 11](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/AP11_FINAL_APPROACH.ogv) are organised all through Space. Kids dress up as key figures who helped make the mission happen (little girls do favor Margaret Hamilton, lugging around fake coding books all day) or astronauts from the Apollo crew. Theatre pieces, reenactments, or skit comedies about the early days of human exploration of space happen all over the stations, and consumption of butter, sugar and flour spike because of the traditional baking of moon cookies. When this bankday coincides with Eid al-Fitr, the Spacer Muslim celebration with good food often spills out of the home, resulting in community-wide banquets. Spacers who are able to will take the next day off to pack away leftovers and distribute them amongst their local communes, unions or districts.

The third most popular bankday is the birth of Johannes Kepler on December twenty-seventh. For those of us who visit a Space Station (be it the Moon Base, one of the Ceres Domes, or the Lagrange Four colonies), this day might be the most confusing. Most of us Earthers would expect Christmas or Hanukkah celebrations, or preparations for New Year’s Eve, perhaps. Those festivities still take place, but the religiously-related celebrations are mostly kept private. Be mindful of this (see “Spacers and Religion” p. 96). Do not talk about Christmas trees: cutting down trees is a taboo in Space! 

Apart from Spacer homes, where menorahs and small nativity scenes in painted regolith ceramic reign supreme, Space stations will be decked out in decorations celebrating the German astronomer who devised the formula for describing astral body movements. White, blue, red and grey baubles are assembled in mobiles, imitating the gravitation of the stars or planets or moons. The most intricate ones can be seen in the Lagrange Four Island Two spaceport district, where Unions have been competing for most complex mobile since the early years of the O’Neill cylinders. Tradition dictates that old trinkets are thanked for their comfort and let go, following the teachings of Grandmaster Kondo cycle of object life. Most Spacers, be they of any confession from Buddhist or Animist to Muslim or Christian, hold the belief that the lives of animals, plants and objects are cyclical. Kepler Day is a day to celebrate that.

`— Le Guide du Routard/Lonely Planet, “Space”`

Steve bounded up the stairs four at a time, sweaty from his workout and sweaty from his run back home from the gym. Soon after he’d regained some semblance of stability in life, he had discovered that the wipeout also gave him an insane amount of energy that only equally insane amounts of physical therapy and high-intensity workouts helped abate. That still didn’t solve the intense headaches he would get sometimes when the sensory overload from electrical sounds left his brain unable to do anything but register pain. Dark days were, nevertheless, getting fewer and farther between.

He reached the landing at top speed and sprinted down the hallway, sliding to a stop in front of the door to their flat — they still hadn’t moved, since they were both still in the welfare-slash-job uncertainty limbo, and registering as a couple in Census Admin had nearly gotten them an even smaller flat. So right now, they were laying low and enjoying their digs until they had stable jobs.

Anyway.

Yeah, his ADHD meds not working anymore because of wipeout was a new hurdle he could have done without.

Steve swayed on the balls of his feet and exhaled deeply to calm himself down, for no particular reason other than he sometimes tried not to act too much like a ball of lightning on speed in front of Bucky. Sometimes depersonalisation struck Bucky again, and Steve being one hair’s breadth from doing cartwheels in the living room generally didn’t help in those moments.

He focused on the colony’s song; that unexpected side-effect of wipeout always helped.

He opened the door sedately, and high-fived himself.

“Bucky?” Nobody answered, so he unlaced his boots and kicked them off. “Baby?” Silence never boded well. Either Bucky was feeling very out of himself, or he might be having a depressive episode.

Once in the living room, he could see that Bucky was staring off into space at the kitchen counter. He looked calm and had a soft smile on his face, his eyes unfocused and looking out the window, grey like today’s skies. He’d cut his hair yesterday, so it was back to a short cut, a bit wavy on top, with a single curl falling onto his forehead.

Steve was absolutely smitten, huh?

Bucky clenched his jaw. Ah.

Then this wasn’t so much a depression problem as a… feeling far-from-home problem.

Steve padded over. “Hey.” He touched Bucky’s hand gently so as to not startle him.

Bucky blinked.

“Having a Sergei moment?”

Bucky blinked again, and smiled softly, his dimples showing. “Yeah, sorry. Saw the sky, thought of his birthplace. Had a jarring moment because of the whole…” — Bucky drew a straight line in the air. — “axis thing.”

“Had to pick through your thoughts, huh?”

Bucky nodded and looked down at what he had been doing before, which looked like unpacking groceries. “Oh, we got some corn.”

Right, okay, changing the subject, Steve could do that. Steve chuckled and nudged Bucky’s shoulder. “Gonna give me a kiss first, or do I rate under corn, now?” He could change the subject. Sometimes, Sergei was too painful for Bucky to want to deal with.

Bucky snorted and made a show of focusing on the grocery bag, but Steve was having none of it, so he braced himself on the counter and half-climbed, half-leant over to smooch Bucky all over his face until he stopped being stupid and fucking kissed him back.

The giggle Bucky gave up as he finally kissed him eased Steve’s mind. They were fine.

They unpacked the groceries and the several ears of fresh corn they had gotten; it looked like the recent food shortages had finally been solved — something about a disease spreading through several of the agripods and forcing the colony to ration several vegetables and fruits.

“What are we eating?”

Bucky rifled through their preserving jars and spices. “I was thinking about something simple? Creamy corn empanadas? Maybe I’ll add some soy protein in there…” He looked judgingly over his shoulder at Steve. “You can’t keep working out on no protein.” Steve grinned and flexed his biceps, which looked all kinds of ridiculous, because he might have been exercising a lot, but he still was skinny as hell and sported only lean muscles. Bucky rolled his eyes and got the grilled sweet pepper jar from the back of the shelf. “This?” He shook the jar in Steve’s direction.

“Oh, yummy!”

“Can you get the flour?”

Steve retrieved the ginormous bag from the small pantry, which had been the biggest downgrade in changing flats, actually. At least segment one had commune pantries. Segment two was really getting the short end of the stick here: no commune pantries, but no big pantries like segment three and upwards.

As Bucky busied himself making the dough, Steve helped by husking the corn cobs. Right now, on welfare, they couldn’t really afford to have some of the basic vegetable prep be done for them.

At some point, Bucky began whistling while they were cooking, and Steve smiled. They had researched that song some weeks ago, because neither of them knew what it was, it had just popped into Bucky’s head overnight and hadn’t left. Turned out it was, amongst other small things, one of those leftover Sergei moments, thoughts and memories. The guy had slowly disappeared as Bucky started using him less and less as a security blanket. He’d written his thoughts down, sheets of paper covered with random factoids about a life long gone, down to the day when he’d started fading too much to add to the scrapbook of his life. Then he’d spent his small windows of time wandering the colony and asking Steve to paint him blue skies with no axis.

One day, Sergei had been there and had given Steve a hug, a weirdly rigid affair because the poor guy still had no clue how to deal with human contact. Steve had returned the hug, bemused, watched him clench his jaw, — he always did, it was the number one giveaway that Sergei was there — and then Sergei had said, “Just wanted to say goodbye.”

And that had been it.

Steve made a little pile with all the corn husks.

Sometimes, he missed that caustic humor and the muttered Russian curses he’d overhear. The images he’d painted, the sheaf of papers scrawled tight with random thoughts, it wasn’t enough, sometimes. Steve knew, of course, that even at the beginning, Sergei had been an echo of who he had been when he was alive. A dead man walking to his long-awaited rest, fifty years in the making.

But.

Sergei hadn’t wanted to die, and Steve had sworn not to leave him, and now he had slipped into the night, only leaving behind a jaunty tune and the memory of cold Russian days. A pile of disjointed memories and a drawing of Yelena, buried under a memorial tree.

“Hey, you okay?”

Steve shook himself out of his funk and smiled up at Bucky. “Yeah.” Bucky’s hands were full of dough and flour; Steve poked his cheek, where his dimple was. “Love you.”

“Love you too, sunshine.” And when Steve poked him again, Bucky made a show of trying to bite his finger.

They finished cooking, and the simple domesticity managed to get Steve entirely out of his gloomy thoughts. There was a brief squabble over where to eat, but Steve had the final say when he reminded Bucky that there was going to be a big government announcement soon on TV. Bucky, who had been adamant that a meal should be consumed at a table because “you are thirty and should learn to sit in a chair, _Steve,_ ” finally relented.

Plate piled high with empanadas and red and yellow grilled pepper strips, Steve sat down and nearly sent his plate flying twice while rearranging himself until he was comfortable.

Bucky turned the TV on, holding his plate far away from Steve’s hazard zone. “Steve, did you put your fingers in a socket, or what?”

Steve grumbled and settled down, feet buried under Bucky’s ass. “I don’t have to answer to you, you’re not a detective anymore.”

Bucky snorted and propped his own feet on his psychology textbooks, shoving a tablet to the side with his big toe. “I’m training to do psych eval, you sure as fuck will answer my questions at some point.”

“This sounds like a conflict of interest, I’ll report you to Ethics.” Steve stuffed his face with his first empanada.

Bucky batted at his shin. “Shhh, it’s starting.”

Steve mumbled something that might have been “ _you_ shut up” but his mouth was so full it was all unintelligible.

On the TV was a very wide desk, tidy, with some strategically-placed objects, tablets, pens, three sheets of paper, the Lagrangian Union flag — which everybody tended to call the Spacer Feds flag — hung on the wall behind the desk and framed by two narrow windows overlooking a grassy field and the windows into space.

“What d’you think they’ll say?” Steve asked around another bite of empanada.

Bucky shrugged. “Don’t know, I just hope they won’t sweep it under the carpet.”

The last few months had seen a succession of revelations spilled to the press about alleged crimes, rumors, and inquiries into misbehaviour in the Space Armed Forces. Investigative journalists had taken some time to root out sources and point out how having an Army theoretically Space-bound but in reality under Earth’s thumb created, and would keep creating, conflicts.

Soon enough, as Steve and Bucky were still in the process of rebuilding themselves, the summer headlines had begun to shift from the recent scandals of big money Earthers trying to pay their way into power to autumn headlines about SAF going rogue and trafficking misappropriations.

Steve had ranted at length about the equal importance of preventing capitalists from invading the colony and how he sure hoped they “wouldn’t see the sudden lack of interest as an overture, Bucky, can you imagine? Capitalism? In this day and age?” He’d also thrown his hands in the air for full effect.

The three Space Colonies and Stations Federation leaders walked into the frame looking grave and sat at the desk, with Brunehilde “Valkyrie” Thompson looking grim, even though she was decked out in a silvery pantsuit. Teddy Altman — who had only recently been named as one of the three federation council heads — sat down in between her and Carol Danvers, who looked borderline thunderous.

“Shame we won’t get to catch a glimpse of that Billy boyfriend of his,” Steve commented offhandedly. He picked up three pepper strips with his fork.

“You already getting tired of me?”

“You cannot tell me you haven’t noticed the councilman’s fiancé’s legs, Bucky. I know you have working eyes.”

Bucky shushed him as Valkyrie began speaking.

“Citizens of space, islanders and miners. You, the people who live at the very limits of human territory in the universe, know the uncertainties of living in the most dangerous of places. We all live in habitats where a single hole could mean the destruction of the places we live in. Mining operations where a step too far means death. Laboratories where a mishap could trigger chain reactions that we, in Space, have no possibility to escape.”

“Hence, we are all intimately conscious that a society is only as strong as its weakest member. And a government is only as ethical as the most corrupt of its elements.”

“There is no margin for error, here in space. We do not have the comfort of not making a decision and leaving an issue unsolved, or waiting for it to solve itself. This is our home, and we do not have the possibility of moving to another. Outside means death, or Earth.”

She sat back and turned her head, making a gesture with her chin towards Altman, who cleared his throat and took his turn giving his statement.

“The first space settlers were scientists and military personnel. We owe those people, who came first from Earth to the Moon and then Ceres, who built the technological marvel that is the Lagrangian Island, we owe them gratitude, but also the moral rectitude of staying true to the ideals upon which they founded these settlements.”

“Yes, without the Earth nations who sent their finest people, we would not exist. Without the scientific ability of those pioneers, those domes under which we live, those habitats orbiting the Earth, would not exist. Without the logistical genius of the joint army corps, most of the governmental bodies that help us run our day-to-day lives would not exist.”

“Nevertheless, being grateful for our origins and the pioneers who made all this possible should not stop us from keeping a clear head and looking head on at their faults and ours. We can only keep true to our ideals if we look critically and take action when needed. We still need a military for its ability to deploy quickly in hostile territory, and to build the basis our societies then thrive on.”

He licked his lips and turned to Danvers, who drummed her fingers on the desk before speaking.

“In the last few weeks, tensions have risen in the Space Armed Forces, one of the founding bodies of all of the space settlements. Spacer society cannot ignore any longer that its military isn’t really its own.”

“As of today, the Judiciary has confirmed that crimes have been committed. Smuggling, receiving stolen tech, refusal to comply with a government order, unlawful imprisonment, accidental death. As the investigations are ongoing and the people responsible are still to be determined and found, we, as a government, have an ethical duty to act.”

“Crimes are, in essence, a spanner thrown into the smoothly running works of our colonies. Our justice system will take care of individual criminals, as is the duty of the Judiciary Branch. The broader concern here is about concealment. Obfuscation. About foreign power meddling in the affairs of a society that, until today, has been a nation in all but name.”

Steve raised his eyebrows and turned to Bucky briefly, but stayed silent before turning back to the TV.

“We, as a society, cannot work against one another and cannot spare the time for strife brought from foreign lands vying for power here. The military has a very particular role here. It is not used to invade and has never been used to defend us. It is the first body to set foot on unsettled land. It built the first habitats so that we can settle there. It helps guard and oversee the harshest habitats on mining asteroids. All Space colonies are not sunbathed paradises.”

“Whoever the culprits are, the structural issues in our army meant that major dysfunctions occurred. No refusal to comply with an order is the product of a single person. Smuggling goods outside the colony cannot be done by a single person.”

“From this day forward and until further notice, all Space Armed Forces regiments will be put on leave, except the first communication regiment, first, second and third astral patrol division. Support divisions will be maintained, as well as barracks, as we set up an Oversight Bureau for the Armed Forces officers of Earther divisions that have to be sent back to Earth. Their chains of command will be reviewed in order to clear them of suspicions of spying or sabotage. The two Brigadier Generals and several well-known Generals such as General Ross and General Fury have been dismissed. Promotions of Spacer Brigadier Generals will happen shortly.”

“Earther military detachments will be sent back slowly as we work to make that last branch of our society both independent, accountable and ethical. It is time we lay those old ways to rest.”

“The Council is hereby declaring formally what has been an informal reality for years. Space independence from Earth. They helped us walk, it is time we run.”

Valkyrie intervened last, giving a closing warning statement.

“As several regiments might have to be stripped from the military, we expect profound changes to happen in society. We ask the population to bear with us, as several of our main Administrations might get bogged down by ex-military personnel to house, hire, relocate, or treat.”

As the three bent over the desk to sign the orders in a symbolic flourish on paper, Steve gaped at the television, his plate forgotten.

“Did they just…?”

“Wow.”

Steve turned to Bucky. “Space is independent now?”

Bucky’s wide-eyed stare shifted from the screen, where Councilman Altman was detailing something about new frontiers, ground to be broken, something or other. Steve jumped into Bucky’s arms, and Bucky yelped when their plates got flung off their laps and onto the floor.

“Buck! Buck-buck!” He pecked Bucky’s lips. “Oh my god!”

Bucky chuckled under Steve’s assault. “Calm down, sunshine.” Steve tore his t-shirt off and chucked it to the floor. “Steve, what are you doing?”

Steve kissed Bucky hungrily. “Celebratory blowjob.”

“Hmpf?” Bucky looked a bit taken aback, but Steve didn’t have time for that kind of diddling around, alright? Soon his passport would say _Space_ and not _United Nations_ under nationality, and to him, that was everything.

Once they got past Steve’s initial haphazard enthusiasm, they were both half naked, and the random smooches had switched to heated kisses, their tongues tangling and hands roaming all over their bodies. Bucky whimpered when Steve slipped his hand into his underwear and gently squeezed his fattening cock. Bucky’s dick twitched, and Steve felt the humidity of sweat and precome on his hand as they both rutted against each other.

Steve broke the kiss, narrowly escaping Bucky nipping at his bottom lip.

He sat up, hand twisted so it could stay inside Bucky’s underwear, and enjoyed for a half a second the sight of his boyfriend splayed on the couch, hair in disarray and lips shiny and red from their kisses. Bucky was breathing hard and smiling at him like he was really living up to his nickname, a ray of sunshine. Bucky’s hands were gripping his hips, thumbs on his hip bones, bruisingly tight. Bucky always tended to grab him and hold on tight during sex, as if Steve could float away at any moment.

Steve leant down, and brushed his nose against Bucky’s, eyes closed and happy.

“Hey,” he murmured.

Bucky pecked his lips. “Hey.”

Steve sat up again and took his hand off Bucky’s dick, then slithered down Bucky’s body until he was level with his groin. “Push your hips up, baby.”

Bucky obliged, all wide grins and flushed cheeks. From his vantage point, getting Bucky’s trousers off, Steve took great delight in admiring Bucky’s stomach, the faintest trace of his abs, the smattering of body hair from his chest down to his — Steve pulled sharply at the offending articles of clothing — dick.

He immediately dove down and licked Bucky’s cock from root to tip, and Bucky’s hands automatically flew to his hair — “Ha! Steve!” — gripping it, holding on.

He chuckled and licked again. When Bucky’s dick jumped, he let the tip kiss his lips before licking again and again and again.

He felt his hair being pulled as if Bucky wanted to haul him up and give him a piece of his mind, so Steve finally relented in his teasing and took Bucky in his mouth, the two of them moaning in unison.

“Oh fuck, Steve.” Steve slowly slid down Bucky’s dick, listening to his moans and cries like sacred music, until his nose was nestled in Bucky’s pubic hair and he could feel Bucky’s glans hitting the back of his throat. “Stevestevesteve.” Steve inhaled and relaxed, and swallowed.

He felt so good right there, enveloped in Bucky’s noises and Bucky’s smell, sweat and precome and a faint trace of soap. Bucky’s hands on his scalp, the sharp pleasurable pain of his hair being pulled, the pressure of the cock in his throat, pushing his tongue down. He felt blanketed and filled at the same time.

He swallowed again.

“Fuck!” He had to breathe at some point, he was sure, but he swallowed again. “Steve, I’m—”

Steve had a front row seat to feel Bucky’s dick twitch, and ever since they had sorted themselves out, he had made it his life mission to learn all the hair triggers of Bucky’s body. So Steve ignored Bucky’s insistent whines and kept swallowing until he had to let go and breathe. Then he slowly sucked up the shaft, until only the very tip was held between his lips.

He looked up from under his eyelashes.

“Holy shit.”

He smiled, then used the tip of his tongue to poke at the slit. He could feel his own spit around his mouth, on his chin, and he could see that it was all over Bucky’s groin.

“Wanna come in my mouth?” he asked, his lips sliding over Bucky’s cockhead and making him shiver. In his pants, Steve felt his own dick twitch and drool some precome against the fabric. God, suckjobs really got to him so much.

Bucky nodded jerkily. Steve bent down and put one of his hands in his trousers, trying to relieve some of the pressure, but Bucky twisted around and batted at his arm until Steve whined, cock halfway in his mouth.

He frowned and retaliated by licking a long stripe down the shaft — the heat pooling in between his legs felt nearly unbearable, fuck Bucky, seriously — then licked at his balls, tongue flat and eyes closed, he played around, listening to Bucky soft moans and keening noises to know where to direct his efforts. He was also counting on Bucky’s renewed distraction to try jerking off again, but as he took Bucky’s left testicle in his mouth, Bucky cried out and simultaneously grabbed his arm before he could slide his hand down again. 

Steve moaned in frustration — He wanted to jerk off! — and stopped his ministrations, licked one last time at a rivulet of saliva around the root of Bucky’s dick and then got back to sucking, going to town this time because his own sanity was on the line.

It quickly became merely a question of up and down and moaning and feeling that cock jump in his mouth and the bitter taste, the liquidy gooey texture of precome on his tongue. It quickly became mostly sighs and wails and Bucky grabbing at the arm of the couch instead of ripping Steve’s hair out. Steve could feel heat pooling in the pit of his stomach, electricity coursing all along his spine, could _hear_ the way his cybernetics were reacting to his own rising desire, the closer he was getting, the hissier the buzz from his main implant got. Electricity at the base of his spine, zinging through him, mounting at the same pace he had set out for blowing Bucky.

Up, and down.

“Oh fuck, Steve! I’m—” Steve suckled on the tip of his cock. “I’m so close!”

He smiled and went down one last time so that when Bucky yelled out his orgasm, he felt the first spurts right on his tongue.

Bucky came and came and Steve swallowed most of it before he sat back up, leaving streaks of come on Bucky’s dick on purpose.

He watched as Bucky caught his breath, and when he saw him coming back to his senses, he asked beatifically, “Want me to clean you up?”

“Wha—?”

Steve bent down again and licked all over Bucky’s still mostly-erect dick.

Of course, Bucky was oversensitive. “No! Nono oh my god, ah!” Steve lewdly licked at a smear of come around the middle of the shaft, and then licked a streak that snaked from the tip to his navel.

Then he finally sat back, finished. That would serve Bucky right for preventing Steve from jacking off during a blowjob, ha!

“You’re such a shit,” Bucky wheezed.

Steve bit his lip and licked the corner of his own mouth. “I thought I was a ray of sunshine?”

Bucky rolled his eyes and made a come hither gesture. Steve giggled, took his trousers and pants off in less than two seconds — his dick slapped against his belly, so very red and rigid, he couldn’t hold back from slightly squeezing the base to try and stave off his impending orgasm — and knee-walked up the couch until his dick was right in front of Bucky’s mouth.

Steve guided his cock to Bucky’s lips, avoiding pushing in when Bucky opened up, and smeared some precome on his bottom lip like the porniest lipgloss. “You were such a meanie…” he whispered, mesmerised by Bucky’s lips and his pink tongue swiping down to get a taste, then peeking out to lick at the tip of his cock. “So mean.”

“You gonna make me regret it?” he felt Bucky’s mouth move against his glans as he said it, cheeky grin and heated stare pinning Steve in place.

Fuck, Bucky was so gorgeous.

Steve used the hand that wasn’t feeding his cock into Bucky’s inviting mouth to comb Bucky’s hair back, until he had a firm grasp on the back of his head.

Bucky put both his hands on Steve’s thighs, ready to signal if he needed to tap out.

He went slow at first, letting Bucky get used to his girth and length again and letting himself get reacquainted with the wetness, the softness, the fucking feel of Bucky’s lips surrounding his cock, his tongue flicking against his shaft or cushioning his dick. He went as far as he could, checking regularly that Bucky was okay while he tried to take some deep breaths and ignore the tightening in his groin. Fuck, but he was so close. So very close.

So close, he had no time to waste. He used his hand at the back of Bucky’s head to support him and picked up speed, fucking Bucky’s mouth like there was no tomorrow, his gaze transfixed by the sight of his cock, shiny with spit, sliding in and out, the flush of his cheeks, the little frown of concentration, the wetness at the corner of his eyes, his hollowed cheeks and reddened lips.

“Ha. Buck.” His breaths started to go ragged and uneven. “Baby, fuck.”

He could feel and hear his orgasm, so goddamn close.

Then Bucky opened his eyes and looked directly at him, and goddamn it all if that wasn’t what pushed him over the edge.

Steve’s brain whited out for a short time, he felt Bucky swallow around him, and he caught himself on the back of the couch before he keeled over.

Bucky, being the most aware of them both, arranged them in a hug while Steve was still busy rebooting.

He came to with Bucky kissing the top of his hair and tracing patterns on his arm. Steve smiled against Bucky’s warm skin and kissed the pec he was currently using as a pillow.

“Hey.”

Steve drowsily looked up. “Hey.”

They exchanged a smile, and then lazy kisses.

Later, Steve would swear they had absolutely intended on getting up and doing some chores, maybe. Bucky had to work on his next psychology lecture topic, Steve had to study to retake the detective exam, too. They had stuff to do. Serious adult stuff.

They were rudely woken up an hour later from their nap on the couch by Bucky’s alarm ringing shrilly in the living room.

“Whassit wha?”

Bucky grunted and blindly searched around for his phone, twisted to get it from the coffee table, miscalculated, and sent them both to the floor in a tangle of limbs.

“... Ow,” Steve said, nose smushed against his balled-up trousers and the parquet.

Bucky extracted an arm and felt around until he had his phone in hand. “Ah, shit.”

Steve un-pretzeled himself to see what was going on. “What?” Bucky was typing a message.

“We need to get ready or we’re gonna be late for our outing. Don’t wanna have Sam bitching at me for weeks.”

Oh, dear.

The “outing.”

“Oh.”

Bucky extricated himself from Steve, pecked him on the forehead, and then sauntered off to the bathroom.

Looking at his bubble butt disappearing around the corner, Steve thought that maybe he should try for some level of enthusiasm at least, and maybe it would help stave off the stress? Fake it till you make it?

Faking it seemed to work all through the shower that they took together and managed to keep efficient, and all through getting dressed in skintight clothes. Only minimal groping happened on Bucky’s part because he said he had to “assess Steve’s progress” and took advantage of Steve’s tight cotton undershirt. After the second ironic remark about Steve being close to having muscle tiddies, Steve had had to shut Bucky up, which involved a lot of giggles, curses and kisses. Then they were nearly at the door when Steve remembered the empanada disaster, so there was an emergency cleaning whirlwind because they knew they would be exceptionally drained when they came home later .

All in all, they were only fifteen minutes late when they got off the tram at the entrance to support pillar number sixteen, which was a small victory in itself when one had a Steven Grant Rogers in tow.

Steve had spent the whole journey avoiding thinking about where they were going and for what, and they had made plans for Laika Day, what Bucky and Steve and Becca could make for Alpine, and maybe they could take the cat to Kopernik Park.

They had arrived both much too soon and much too late.

Sam was already there, of course, and greeted them with a warm hug.

Man, those hugs were the best. Or like, second best. Steve’s gaze slid to Bucky greeting Dr. Temple.

The mirrors were beginning to close, making the sun set on this gloomy day. The sky was still a hazy whitish grey, the axis and the other side of the colony cylinder now completely obscured. Passersby trickled out of the main street, going home after a long day of work.

“Hi, Steve. You ready?”

Steve nodded to Claire and the four of them proceeded to walk over to one of the doors at the base of the enormous support pillar. It was black and covered with signs alerting the reader that only authorised personnel was allowed there.

Claire flashed a temporary pass at the side of the door.

The door opened onto a dark platform. The nerves Steve had been trying to distract himself from for some time returned in full force, and he swallowed with difficulty.

Bucky interlaced their fingers, startling him out of his anxious thoughts. They looked at each other, and Bucky smiled tremulously. “Not leaving you.”

“Not letting you go,” Steve answered.

With this, they followed Claire and Sam inside.

First, they had to suit up. Steve and Bucky let go of each other only for the time necessary to don the available spacesuits and try the magboots, turn them on and off several times — they had to make sure, they had to be sure they wouldn’t be thrown off. Helmets under their arms, their hands clasped together again as best as they could with spacesuit gloves, and they turned towards Sam, who was now all decked out in one of those blue-and-grey suits made for repair jobs, the only one big enough for him, and Claire, who had put on a standard yellow one.

“We good?”

Both Steve and Bucky, tongue tied, nodded at Sam in unison. Sam nodded back, opened the door onto the first set of stairs down to a platform, and pushed the button that would lower the platform down into Liminal Space.

Steve squeezed Bucky’s hand harder.

They had worked for months for this. He’d had to deal with a fear of darkness and claustrophobia from his time in jail, and agoraphobia from his little jaunt in freefall. He couldn’t really live in Island one if he both feared enclosed spaces and wide open infinity, right?

On the other hand, Bucky had a lot of PTSD to deal with, as well as his latent astrophobia that had grown into a full-blown fear. He had never really loved space and had left that fear untreated all his life. The fact that it had ratcheted up to an inability to look out the main windows of the colony had become unbearable.

Oh, and there was, of course, the small matter of their worst nightmares being… That One Moment Back Then. Back _There_.

So yeah.

Therapy.

Dr. Temple had said that they could take another road, lessening the symptoms, some medication to help, to mitigate. But when had either of them done anything else than be hard-headed bastards, grabbing their fears by the ears and kissing them squarely between the eyes?

This was the culmination of all this work. Sam had told them, and then Bucky had read about it while studying, how this could go to shit, how it could reinforce the trauma.

But they’d still said, fuck it. Go big or go home.

Liminal Space hadn’t changed. It sounded a bit busier; maintenance crews were still around for the last shift of the day. The sounds of the colony had changed as they had descended into the maze of gangways. The colony’s mainframe song was nearly drowned out by a multi-tonal whirr, every machine in the space having its little tone, its little tune.

And those were the noises only Steve could hear. Since workers were still there, heavy-duty machinery was also still running, and the croaking hum of the hull sometimes drowned out every other sound.

“Helmets!” Claire called over the din.

It was exaggeratedly soon for them to put on helmets, but today wasn’t about the usual — it was about being reassured and keeping a lid on the anxiety. It was about managing the trauma. Overcoming it.

The commotion was somewhat muted once he put on the helmet. Steve pressed on the helmet’s communication link. “Bucky?”

At first there was only the sound of muted pandemonium, then two soft breaths. “I’m here.”

Steve smiled, Bucky smiled too, and leant down, touching their helmets together.

Steve didn’t really remember reaching the hatch. It was all narrow pathways, metal grids and platforms, stairs and warning signs. The journey was a bit of a blur because he was focusing so much on his breathing, on making it regular and calm. He focused on Bucky’s breathing too, and at some point they synced, and it was…

It was good.

Fuck dealing with their codependency, he needed it. He’d take all the codependency in the world.

Their hands, clasped together, were the single point helping him stay present during what was happening.

Bucky was there, so it would be all okay.

The thing was, Steve and Bucky had separately made several trips back into Liminal Space already. Acclimatising. It had been overwhelming, then difficult, then only mildly disturbing. They would be okay. He was still far from being as comfortable as he’d been Before, but he was getting there. He and Sam were taking things slow, visiting the colony again, bit by bit. Both to get back into their old hobby and to give Steve some other outlet for the wipeout-induced pent-up energy.

What made his palms sweat right now was just the prospect of what was to come.

Bucky squeezed his hand, and he heard Sam’s tinny voice say, “We’re here, guys.”

There they were.

They had stopped in front of a spacewalk hatch. Steve took in the heavy, hermetic glass door, the small room behind, and the heavy steel and aluminum door after that. The signs, alerting them to the dangers of explosive decompression and reminding them that magboots had to be checked before setting the opening process in motion. The hatch number, a different number, and a Brady tag with phosphorescent paint beside it on a railing. Maintenance had been here recently.

“Okay, Bucky? Steve?” Claire waited for them to make any kind of acknowledging sound before continuing. “Remember, we’ll be here at all times. We will use a lifeline, so you have absolutely no risk of drifting, okay?”

“Yeah,” Bucky croaked out, whereas Steve only nodded.

“You check your magboots?” Sam asked.

They both tapped their heavy boots, and they clanked on the metal grid of the gangway, rooting them to the spot.

“Good, now you take this.” Sam passed them two metal ropes which they spent the next minute attaching to their suits, then checking, then double-checking, then Steve had to check Bucky’s for himself, and Bucky did the same. At some point, their gazes crossed, and they could see each other’s pale face through the gold-tinted helmet visor.

“Not leaving you.”

Bucky jerked his head more than he nodded. “Not letting you go.”

“I love you.”

Bucky sighed. “Me too.”

Claire and Sam didn't try to interrupt their moment. 

Bucky nodded jerkily. “Okay.”

Steve exhaled and then turned to Sam and Claire, who were waiting patiently by the hatch, half-bathed in white light, half-hidden in the stark shadows of the cavernous place.

Sam went to type in the code on the lock and Claire flipped her card in front of the pad. Everything was done in Steve's clear view so that he could check. So he could be sure that this hadn't been hacked, hijacked. Tampered with.

Then the hatch door opened, three blinking green lights on the hatch ceiling okaying their entry.

Fuck.

His hand swayed, was squeezed, and he noticed his irregular breathing and a soft whine escaping his lips.

“Hey.” Bucky's voice was all strange in his ear, both distorted by the commlink and the ruckus that implants, electronics and his own heartbeat made.

“I can't…”

“We can stop at any time, Steve.” That was Sam's voice.

“No, no.” He shook his head. “I don't want to go in first.” That box, empty and gaping open like the mechanical mouth of a metallic monster, looked horrifying. “Not me,” he whined.

He felt Bucky's helmet bump against his and saw Sam and Claire exchange a look.

“Okay,” Sam said.

He was the first to enter, followed closely by Claire. Already, the hatch looked less gigantic, less like the hungry maw of the colony ready to chew him up and spit him out into the cold.

“Good thinking, Steve.”

Steve looked up at Bucky. “What? What was?”

“You couldn't bear to go inside alone, like last time.” Their hands swung again between them and squeezed, but Steve would be damned if he knew whether this was his or Bucky’s doing. “I wouldn't have been able to look at you in there alone, either.”

Steve had nothing to say to that; the monster still looked a bit hungry. Was it horrible of him to need to offer Bucky first to satiate its hunger?

“Should we—?” Steve cleared his throat. He could back out.

He felt Bucky move and heard his boots clank loudly on the bit of platform leading up to the hatch. Steve let himself be led to the monster, breaths ragged and gasping, feet heavily weighted down by the boots, the top of his body floaty and his head feeling faint.

The four steps they had to take lasted forever. Or were less than a second long.

When inside, Steve started counting to himself.

“Gear check!” Sam said loudly enough for Steve and Bucky to startle.

They kept busy with checking every seal, seam and clasp on each other's suit, both of them anxious, stressed, flushed, but frowning and looking resolute.

This was all scripted, long planned between the four of them, and Sam took advantage of them being focused on something else to close the hatch door. This had been the plan. This was the plan.

The lights blinked green, then yellow, then green again.

“HATCH DOOR — LOCKED”

The plan. The sound of that voice, Claire had made them listen to pre-recorded spacewalk hatch messages to desensitise them. It still made Steve’s heart jump in his chest and the wipeout whine an alarm.

“Still good?”

Bucky actually took the time to think on it. “I hate that voice now,” he grumbled darkly.

Steve giggled nervously. “Me too, fuck.” Still better than fearing it.

“Guys, boot check?”

They both tapped their boots, tapped them again to verify that they would be able to attach to the magnetic siding on the colony's outside hull.

“Lifeline check?”

They fumbled over the metal ropes with trembling hands. “All good, Sam!”

“Great!”

They watched, hands clasped, bodies as close as could be, as Sam attached the lines to the hatch wall, then secured them with the locking system.

“Still okay? Check in with yourselves,” Claire said while Sam was puttering around the place, locking up lines, tools, emergency kits and fetching two rope guns each — Steve felt immediately better. Tether string guns, they saved lives.

Bucky was, astonishingly — or not — faring a bit worse than Steve.

“Steve.” Their helmets bumped, Bucky's voice was shaky, and the perspiration beading on his forehead looked like liquid gold under the lighting of the helmet’s goldcoated glass.

“I'm not leaving you, _I'm not_.”

“Please, again.” He sobbed a bit.

“Shh, hey.” Steve hugged Bucky with one arm, unable to let go of his hand. “I'm not leaving you and you—”

“I won't let go, I won't.”

“You swear?”

Bucky nodded awkwardly; their suits and helmet were getting in the way. “I swear.”

“I swear, too.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” Steve wished with all he had he could hug Bucky properly. They would, soon enough. “Sam. We're okay,” he called back.

They kept hugging while Sam and Claire launched the spacewalk procedure. It was actually so convoluted when not hijacked to hell and back that it assuaged some of Steve's anxiety.

This was different.

“STARTING DECOMPRESSION PROCEDURE — PLEASE INPUT NUMBER OF PERSONNEL — PLEASE PUT HELMETS ON — AIR TANK ON —”

This was different.

“SECURE TOOL KITS — DECOMPRESSION AT TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT”

He exhaled, as if he could let go of all his terror in a huff of air. The sound echoed the noise decompression made.

“DECOMPRESSION AT FIFTY PERCENT.”

He could be there for Bucky. The primary vacuum pump was churning at top speed, emptying the leftover air slower and slower.

“DECOMPRESSION AT SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT.”

This message got transmitted directly to their communication devices, since the air was now so rarefied that no sound would propagate correctly. Steve looked at the pressure gauge on the wall, numbers hurtling down to deciPascals… ten Pascals. One Pascal of air pressure.

“Steve.”

“I’m here, I’m with you. I’m not leaving you.” He was captivated.

Half a Pascal.

“END DECOMPRESSION — AUTHORISE HATCH OPENING”

From the corner of his eye, Steve saw Sam pull the lever down to open the big aluminum hatch door, but he stayed focused on reassuring Bucky.

That hated voice droned on, warning them that all personnel must remain inside while the hatch was still opening; Steve’s world was now reduced to Bucky. Bucky’s breaths, Bucky’s every single move, Bucky’s distress, but also Bucky swearing up and down he wasn’t letting him go, and his hand crushing Steve’s, even through the spacesuit gloves.

The double door made no sound, the rumble could only be felt through their thick-soled magnetic boots, and even then, the slight vibration was sometimes lost to the bigger unceasing shudder of the hull.

“Buck?”

Bucky hummed and opened his eyes, staring directly at Steve. It seemed as if opening his eyes helped him be more grounded, because he stopped trembling so much.

Steve licked his lips, trying to find the words to help. “Hand check?”

Bucky chuckled nervously, closed his eyes and held their clasped hands up. “Check.”

Steve grinned. “Look outside.”

He saw surprise paint itself gradually on Bucky’s face, as if he’d expected all along that they would be sucked into space. And maybe that was his biggest fear. Not the stars, not the universe or the emptiness. Not the black infinity. Maybe his fear had been falling, rope gun unspooling, losing control. Or maybe it had been something else, or maybe he didn’t fear anything that much once he was reminded of Steve’s presence.

Who knew? Who knew what fear was, what it was made of and how it worked?

Claire and Sam walked out, stomping in their ungainly magboots.

“Should we follow?”

Bucky bit his lip, the yellow and green lights reflected at the top of his helmet. “Yeah?”

This time, it was Steve who took the first step.

It was weird, walking outside. The hull shuddered randomly, and there were fluorescent stripes showing the specific routes one could take with magboots only. They had to climb outside because of the change in gravity, but they did so slowly so that neither Steve nor Bucky would have to stop holding the other’s hand.

Outside, in space, Sam and Claire were attaching the lifeline to several anchor spots, securing levers so that they wouldn’t have to worry about it.

The hull was pockmarked with pits from micrometeorites, and there was a big scorch mark nearby. High above their heads, one of the three sun mirrors of the colony had stopped retracting. It hung there, so gigantic it felt unfathomable.

“Steve, look!”

Steve looked at what Bucky was pointing out and gasped.

Earthrise.

They watched, mesmerised, as the Earth rose slowly, unmarred by the refraction of thick glass windows, the distortion of mirrors.

The day was ending on Island one, and it felt like a page was being turned. They were surrounded by the universe, the black dark matter and cosmic clouds, stars and planets and moons, satellites, natural and man made.

Steve squeezed Bucky’s hand once again.

“Thank you.” Steve heard in his commlink. He looked at the velvet fabric of empty space, the pinpricks of light as old as time.

“For what?” Bucky was looking at him, so Steve looked back, happy to see that under the helmet, Bucky seemed much less anxious, now. The moon reflected itself on the glass, white gold, round, hazy.

Bucky smiled. “For not leaving me in the cold.” He exhaled shakily. “For coming back to me, even when I was lost.”

Steve shook his head and embraced Bucky, right there, in front of everything the cosmos held.

“It just wasn’t the end of the line for us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, a word from my [beta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hark_bananas), because I wouldn't have been able to finish this without them:  
>  _"Every single comma in this fic was added by me except for the bad ones, which are god's little mistakes. I cried a lot while betaing this, but not about the commas. (Also, it's COMMA not COMA.)"_
> 
> Phew. What a ride, huh?
> 
> I don't really have anything clever to say. This fic was my way of coping with a lot of things, because creating a world in sci-fi can be both escapism and a creative outlet. I tried to write and not shy away from difficult subjects, without making this story a political essay (which it is not). I could dig deep into the subtext, and I spent many an hour on Wikipedia learning about anarchism, autonomous cities, science and space shit, protein intake of an average human and landmass efficiency.
> 
> This fic is also a victory over myself, and the fear I've had forever, that my ADHD would always prevent me from seeing a longwinded project to its end.
> 
> So I'll close this story with some fun facts for your enjoyment:
> 
>   * If it had escaped your notice, this story is Stucky, the 2111 "Steve"s and 1922 "Bucky"s should be evidence enough
>   * There are a 198 fucks given in this fic
>   * I cried a lot when Sergei died, he was supposed to be less than a plot point, and ended up appearing 391 times, so long sweet Russian boy
>   * All the names of secondary characters are comics secondary characters: Drenkov a spy in Hulk, Riordan appears in the thunderbolts, Even Martina and Amira I married but picked their name from background characters of marvel wiki
>   * Did you know that fic happened in space? Cause there are 211 occurences of the word to remind you
>   * I've been writing this fic since the first of March when I began the outline, and wrote the fic itself on the seventh. I stopped to write picture doodads in June, took only a month off
>   * Outside of commons verbs, the words that crop up the most are "eyes" (250), hand (235) and door (225)
>   * Those guys are okay, okay? They are telling you 232, so they must be, right?
> 

> 
> Last fun fact? I love comments and I will gush about space exploration with you if you so much as breathe a word of enthusiasm in my direction.

**Author's Note:**

> Come see me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/AlpacaKittens) so we can _squee_ over those boys like this is a 2002 Comic Con.
> 
> Credits:  
>  _Certain music and sound effects for sfx edits were obtained from:_
> 
>   * [ZapSplat](https://www.zapsplat.com/)
>   * [Freepd](https://freepd.com/)
> 



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